1. Most people in my office speak that horrendous Chinglish smashgorism that is highly prevalent in the Singaporean population, making me ("the banana") the odd one out. I suppose it is social situations like this that highlight the intense bifurcation between the different strata in our nation - a growing problem that could honestly be virtually unsolvable.
2. Most working people do not care about the technicalities or what they (I believe) consider to be "minor issues" of the English language. It irks me when the proof reading for official government documents is either a) never done or b) sloppy, judging from the poor grammar, inaccurate prepositions and the omission of the definite article. With most of my supervisors and colleagues being engineers, I obviously do not expect them to produce reports with high-falutin or elaborate language, but isn't it reasonable of me to hope for simple, clear, unadulterated and most importantly, grammatically correct English?
Most of my supervisors are university graduates, with one even holding a doctorate, and hence I believe that they are rather intelligent people as they have triumphed over the academic rigour of the engineering course. Yet, most of the ones I have worked with are unable to string grammatically correct sentences in English together, with a warped syntax amongst other issues, and this saddens me because it very possibly means that the education system in Singapore has failed.
To be fair to them, they come from Chinese-speaking backgrounds and are less comfortable in speaking English, which I do not blame them for. However, with this thought in mind, one should presume that they would be able to speak Chinese properly and beautifully, yes? Sadly the reality is a far cry from this assumption, as evidenced by point 1 (as above). The majority of people I have witnessed speaking proper mandarin in full, complete sentences are: 1) People from China, 2) Chinese school teachers, 3) Chinese tuition teachers and 4) Some Malaysian Chinese individuals.
I wonder if this mode of communication is borne out of habit or due to our inability to master a language properly. Personally, I speak the Chinglish smashgorism when I am forced to because 1) my chinese is terrible, 2) I do not have the right social environment to practice speaking proper mandarin and 3) I hate my mother tongue as boring school lessons made the process a bazillion times more painful for me. I admittedly, am very embarrassed and ashamed of my inability to be truly bilingual (against the wishes of our founding father LKY), and now I have forgotten so many Chinese words to the point that I often stare at Chinese characters blankly when browsing through SPH's free publication, My Paper.
So does this mean that Singapore's education system has largely failed us, regardless of your background and what language your family speaks at home?
In scenarios like this, I would honestly love to fly to Scandinavia and force them to reveal their pedagogical secrets, that allow most of their countrymen to speak good English, even though it is their second language.
I was watching videos from YouTuber PewDiePie yesterday, and this blessed hilarious man is from Sweden - the home of Ikea, Swedish meatballs, Stieg Larsson and EFFECTIVELY BILINGUAL HOMOSAPIENS. Obviously while playing his games he was not giving speeches about wormholes and the time-space continuum, but his command of English was good enough to enable him to crack jokes and comment on how terrible and annoying FlappyBird is. I genuinely believe that I am unable to do the same in continuous sentences of Chinese, with my colleagues perhaps only marginally better than me.
If Singapore's education system, learning attitudes and social environment do not change, I guess we will be the "jack of all trades, master of none" in the language realm. Now I also do genuinely pity the people working in the SpeakGoodEnglish and HuayuCool campaigns, because they do have a lot of work cut out for them.
3. On a more shallow note, Tanjong Pagar has great/orgasmic/wonderful/fantastic/[insert superlative here] food. Amigos, if you want to go cafe hopping with me or check out the hawker centres, hit me up!
4. Sending around 400++ emails in the last 4 days of my life was terrible, stressful and deeply unsatisfying. I guess the whole theory of workers having a low morale and hence causing internal diseconomies of scale is very true.
5. Meeting friends for lunch instantly makes my day better - it gives you something to look forward to.
6. It is hard to make friends in the office, especially when your supervisors/colleagues are much older than you and on a different wavelength. The problem is compounded especially when the follow temporary staff are either a) weird as fuck, b) shy or c) unwilling to make friends.
7. Thank god for Whatsapp/SMS/technology, because they keep me connected to people I actually care about, and get me through the daily grind.
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