I don’t know why there are so many Singaporeans crying foul over this video. After viewing it, I thought it was fair comment. If these celebrities think our English sucks and theirs is better, so be it - they are entitled to hold their own beliefs, however flawed it might be.
Equally derogatory: there are many Singapore variety shows I have seen making fun of the way Indian and Chinese nationals speak English. The latest movie by Jack Neo, Ah Long Pte Ltd also poked fun of Malaysian accented English.
These are all entertainment programs pandering to local tastes - cut them some slack lah… they are not public service announcement. If Chen Shui Bian was the one on the program criticising our English, that’s another issue altogether.
While we are quick to criticise, we are also slow to introspect.
The way I see it, there’s no such thing as “pure English”. Yes, seriously. Not even in it’s supposedly country of origin, England.
English is used widely across the world as a universal working language. As a result, many pidgin forms will evolve when it is used in mixture with native languages, requiring constant code switching.
It is this reason that the Singapore government will never be able to eradicate Singlish; despite the millions spent on the Speak Good English Campaign all these years.
Anyway, Arroy Shen and the Taiwan English teacher whom had bear the brunt of the criticism from angry Singaporeans have both apologised on their blog. You can read it yourself on their blogs:
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It might seem a little contradictory when my last blog post is a rant about my pet peeve when people do not pronounce Malay words properly, but I agree with you, I don’t really think of the video clip as much of a big deal.
Because different people are influenced by the way that they talk usually regionally. English definitely sounds different according to the different countries that one goes to.
But when the person completely bastardize the language is when it becomes an issue to me.
Like pronoucing the French word lingerie as LING-GHER-RIE …
Oh dear
Can’t really believe the number of comments that I see on Arroy’s page…. I’m wondering why many of these people can’t really take these sort of things in a light hearted manner…
Ya lor… I feel very sorry for Arroy too. He already apologised, yet still kanna scolding. Want to scold also go scold the other English teacher lah… she never apologise.
I’m a Taiwanese who was grown up in Singapore, having migrated to Singapore since young.
Criticism of the way Singaporeans speak is not something new. In fact, Singaporeans had been criticized for not being able to speak proper english or even proper chinese.
The reason why Singaporeans do not speak proper English (Singlish in fact) is because Singapore’s English lessons do not teach students about phonetics, i.e. the proper way of pronouncing the English word based on native American/British pronunciation. It’s the equivalent of pinyin in Mandarin, which assist one in more proper pronunciation. Pinyin is widely taught in Mandarin classes in Singapore, but phonetics are not taught in English classes. I wonder why.
Mike: I was taught phonetics in my pre-school and primary school years lei. :p