Chinese tea..

Day 18/365

Good evening peeps.

To speak the language, one's needs to do it with the speakers of the language.

I've never attended any Mandarin classes. I've never received any form of formal or informal education in the language. I've never been guided by any Mandarin speakers, formally. Nonetheless. I survive in the Chinese restaurant. I always manage to order my family's favourite dishes for dinner. We always get to enjoy the popular food.

How did I manage while my Chinese educated children fumbled and stumbled upon being asked to talk to the waitress?

I pick up the language from my young charges. I practise it with the native speakers. I don't go for textbook language but the 'people's version. It works most of the time, and it works fairly well, indeed.

Sophyta

When Errors in Language Become the Norm ...

Do you have a social media account? Are you constantly updating your profile? Do you have many friends or followers? I hear you say YES to most of the questions. I'm not surprise if more than half of your friends are using English as the medium of communication since the language has become increasingly popular on this side of the world. 

And, you may have noticed these on your friends' status update or their photos caption:

Congrates friend!

Congratulation!

Colourful of ...... Festival

When the kids is sleeping...

ABC's 12'th Years Anniversary

Birthday MoMo

Our Branch - Delicious!

MuMu Birthday

In more severe cases, perhaps misspelt or misused words or phrases written or published by someone with credibility for all to see and perpetuate it as a proper norm.. This experience may have caused you brief annoyance, haven't they? To me, the errors have become an overpoweringly ubiquitous tick in the back of my mind.

Were they merely overlooked, or did some terribly misguided individuals produce those mistakes under the impression that they were correct? Does our student population of today have a lower literacy competence than we once assumed?

Social media are not to be blamed for all these mess. I strongly believe that the social media play zero role in the dissemination and preservation of common spelling and punctuation errors. As a matter of fact, the poorly written tweets and status updates are merely for the sake of conserving characters. In reality, it's a matter of people misusing punctuation or misspelling words in their status updates simply because they do not know the proper way. 

By rights, the importance of correctness in language is not to be shrugged off!

Image credit.

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