English

Language of international-level usage which many still find it difficult to resort to.

It's the emergency jackhammer you find under your seat whenever you find yourself in a tight spot surrounded by 'alien-language-gibberish' foreigners that you don't know the origin of. And if all fails, maybe that officer behind the desk in some rural country you're having your sweet vacation would understand a couple of lines and offer the help you need in the midst of the bunch of people with their mouths jibbering *&^%$#@!.

Sad to say, I find some who shared the same heritage as I do had a bad time in it, to the point of unable to grasp the basics in a proper fashiion. OK, maybe exclude the Western-educated category, the so-called 'Banana' nicknamed by most of us who know our mother-tongue. External factors out of their own control led to this, so you can't blame them for being like, uhhh, less-fortunate. Poor choice in vocabulary, I know.

But unfortunately, there's quite a large number within the rest of the mother-tongue speaking + writing group that didn't fare well enough with this 'alien-tongue' that's composed of 26 simple alphabets (A for apple B for ball...) and perhaps quite a maze of a grammatical system (I am You are S/He is They are). In favor of the 'mother-tongue' they didn't invest enough skill points into English.

And it's even sad when they put up the excuse of doing poorly in English by putting up the 'mother-tongue pride'. Something like "For Mother Tongue ! Die you Englischists !". Further saddening would be that some of them eventually went to the lines of requesting for something that has to be exposed to them to be 'localised' to their flavor - mother-tongue flavored that is. They rather resort to a 'personal ghetto' to confine themselves away from their self-creating 'horrors of English'.

And perhaps something of the lines below sounds familiar ?

"i dun noe inglish n techer onli noe how 2 spk inglish so y dun giv mi chinese techer 2 tech me"

Don't look at me for that piece of crappish sentence-wannabe, I sucked at composing such poor-tasting comedy on my own. That's just part of my amateurish mimic skills of an attempt to reproduce one of the lines I found in a certain forums under the 'Education' category.

(And it further depresses me that the so-called 'elite students' who had straight A records will say something similiar to that line above too. Depressing future indeed.)

I've looked into the recent MUET results (which I have yet to take). I've looked into that piece of a document my mother forwarded me that was supposedly a formal letter addressing to issues of payment methods filled with backfired attempts to make the letter's author look 'professional'. I've recalled every nook and cranny of my memory fragments trying to recall the very bad moments of 'Engrish' that I've encountered in every piece of my life's experience.

And all those, are evidence. Evidence that, to me, proves how 'sick' my fellows who shared the same ethnic as me are when it comes to deal with this problem of theirs called 'Engrish'. I don't know what the cure is, but I know it's got nothing to do with enhancing the linguistic capabilities of my fellows, but more like to break the SOLID BARRIER of STUBBORNNESS and sit down properly and cope with their English.

I beg thee, people, to save yourself - English is not that tough as you think. In fact I'd rather find it much more reasonable and possible to flunk Maths than English.