Language

So! If you know anything about me then you'd know that my Malay isn't anywhere near as good as it should be. I usually joke around about it alot but sometimes I just think that I've lost out somehow.

I used to dread learning Malay Language in school, mainly because I was so bad at it. It was one of my worst subjects in school, my worst being Agama (Islamic Studies). Since my parents chose to speak to me and my siblings in English and going to a school where the majority of people spoke English, I didn't really have anywhere to practice. Whenever I had to write an essay i used to think up the story in English and then translate it into Malay a little at a time. Since my grammar and vocabulary is pretty bad, this usually ends up making the story I'm trying to tell extremely boring! Which sucked because I loved writing.

After awhile I kind of gave up on trying to improve my Malay Language, since I realised that I would be going overseas to study, I did not see the point in learning it. When I went overseas to study and realised that all the other Malaysians that I met could speak at least English and Malay, and most spoke Mandarin and Cantonese as well. Some of my friends were really impressed that Malaysians knew how to speak so many languages. Sadly when they asked me how many languages I could speak I only said one and a half. Though I did meet some Malays who were more than willing to help me improve my conversational Malay. Sadly, I slowly lost contact with them and my Malay slowly deteriorated as time went on without speaking a language that it suppossed to be my mother-tongue.

As my studies were coming to an end and as i saw my chances of working in the UK taken from me, I realised that I had no choice but to come back home and look for work. This scared the sh!t out of me. I honestly didn't know what level of Malay I needed to have for it to be acceptable or whether I would actually have to speak Malay. I still feel insecure when I speak to someone in Malay. I feel that because I try to rush myself with the words, I might end up saying something I don't mean.

I will do my best to practice Malay and hopefully not embarrass myself or my family longer.
I will stop making jokes about myself not knowing Malay.
I will get more confident when speaking Malay.

Gahhhh! there goes another promise about Wednesday posts. U know what, I'm just gonna try post every Friday instead. That way I'll have the whole week to write something up and leave it to be posted at the end of the week! I think that makes more sense than posting in the middle of the week.