English Genius
Posted by zanglang Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:25:00 GMT
So I was told from this word test that I:
did so extremely well, even I can’t find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don’t. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you’re not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!I scored 92% Beginner, 92% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 80% Expert
Compared to other people of my age and gender:
You scored higher than 35% on Beginner
You scored higher than 25% on Intermediate
You scored higher than 51% on Advanced
You scored higher than 71% on Expert
But seriously, does it take a genius to answer the questions above? Most of pure common sense, some are just sly word play, and a few are those adverb/adjective/noun rules that’re listed in primary school textbooks. I’m not surprised that I didn’t get full marks though (though a little embarrassing to commit the most novice mistakes, lol), I never paid much attention to grammar rules taught in class. For me, writing is only to toss a handful of alphabets into the brain soup and let the course of nature slow rearrange themselves as they would look best, sentence by sentence, a little like construction blueprints. (Or a little more like asking 1000 monkeys with typemachines to collectively write the Bible.) Call me ignorant, call me defiling the language, call me low and uneducated, but gee, as long as you bring the point across, is it not sufficient enough? Still, that would explain why my style is different than most of other casual writers, and can be a tad confusing at times. Some say I’m damn impressive (am I? never thought so), some say I’d be good in cryptic poems and haiku, while some say I’m good in churning out nonsense.
On the other hand, man, I used to suck at english speaking. Even though as a kid I read a lot, got excellent scores in english written tests, being brought up in in a standard chinese family, educated in a Chinese primary school, where everyone speaks chinese, and in a national secondary school, where 50% speaks chinese and the other 50% malay, obviously didn’t help.
By Form 3
And the government is still clueless as to why so many fresh graduates (fyi, at present 90% of unemployed graduates are from local universities, 10% overseas, with most of them being malay), are incapable of finding a job. ‘Race’ part of the discussion aside, let’s just take a quick peek into our uni’s. Lecturer’s nationality: Indonesian. Spoken: Malay. Textbooks: Malay. And since there’s so many malay students, Language where Students Converse Most In: Malay. Hello menteri-menteri sekalian? Are you still wondering why your students never get to dip their toes, lest survive, in the corporate world?
I guess you are certainly expecting someone to counter your statements. Lol. But I’m here to agree with what you’ve said, especially the main point in the last paragraph.
It’s true with what you’ve stated. I won’t say in a racial point of view. But in UTM, there are tons of chinese whose English are on par with those of the Malay ethnic. Take my coursemates for instance. I’ve 6 Chinese friends and only 2 can really challenge my English or even surpass me. The others are, ahem, hopeless…
What’s the government doing? Lol. Anyway, your comments are really great and politicians should really take a read and should start their soul-searching now to avoid further decrease of English standard in Malaysia.
I’ve to respect you. Respect, Man! You write great essays and I’ve learnt a lot from you. Lol. Listen to “Wordplay” by Jason Mraz. You sound like the song.
such coincidence, i had the ASEAN scholarship thing before also, made it to the interview part as well, still remember got a nun that has the exact outfit like mother teresa among the interviewer panel, if my oral doesn’t sucks so much at that time, i’d probably be inside the singapore university right now, or even be given a scholarship for ivy league if i did well enough. my background is similar to yours, brought up in standard chinese family, educated in chinese primary school, and so on.
kelvin: Haih, even if they did, i doubt they’d ever pay attention to whatever individuals like us got to say. =P
However i’m not saying they’re not doing anything lah, their starting out with primary schools was a good idea. But, it ought to be done delicately... otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing all the brouhaha in the media now.
andy: Gee, I remember meeting her too, can’t remember her name anymore, but she had a kind smile =)
after seeing your edit
mine is at 6th grade, year 1998, what about you?
Yeah I think it was form 3, year 1999. Now i’m wondering why didn’t i go for 6th grade’s at that time even though i was signed up by my teacher… Hmm.