Romancing the English language

“After mustered with a retribution caused by insobriety and intolerance, thank God ALL IS WELL NOW... I can see myself perking up and gyrating around filling my days that passed by. Hello world im back and so well!!!”

Wait, please don’t stop reading. That wasn’t me. That was a status update on Facebook. Here are some more bone-jarring examples of our supposed fluency in the English language, a couple of which come from people who work in the business outsourcing industry.

“I didnt realize he went out just to bought me this”

“Having fun watching movie yesterday.”

“My fashion is cooking, I want to be a great chef someday!”

“Do not let other people's failure your success...make it your own.”

Having fractured your funny bone and induced a laugh-deficit disorder, I believe those among you who pay attention to grammar and syntax (and become batty when an adverb is used instead of an adjective or grow claws when they hear/read they’re/their/there mistakes) are just about ready to unscramble an omelette.

Beyond the physical, the most notable aspect of our personality is our ability to communicate. Fluency and eloquence create a very strong and lasting impression. Fact is, people judge us by our manner of expressing ourselves and our ability to use language as a persuasive tool for influencing others.

From our salad days, we had an affirmation that the ability to express ourselves and speak our minds are crucial to our everyday existence. Proficiency in a language is critical to effective communication, and the best language to use in honing our communications skills is our primary language, the language we use at home and in the community we grew up in. I have always believed that it is best for young people to express themselves in their native language whose nuances and subtleties are familiar to them.

When I read that the Department of Education would launch the mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) program, I was delighted. This was how it was back then for us before they rammed Filipino up the wazoo of non-native speakers of this Tagalog-based national language.

I re-read the DepEd press release “DepEd issues guidelines for mother tongue teaching” published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Friday, December 2, 2011 and had a gas: “It is the easiest way for children to access the unfamiliar world of school learning,” Luistro said in a statement, citing local and international studies that show the effectivity (sic) of using a learner’s mother tongue in teaching.

Effectiveness unveiled, not in a very subtle way.

As for me, English was not my first language. My primary education began at age six.  At that time, there were no prep schools or kindergarten classes, at least not in my hometown.  If you were not yet seven years old, you were considered a “visitor”.  How’s that for hyperactive audience participation?

English was not taught in Grade I then (“then” being indicative of my chronological age). We learned our fundamentals via the Aklanon equivalent of the cartilla using the book authored by one of my small town heroes, Roman A. dela Cruz.

Our lessons were taught using Aklanon, our native language, which has a very distinctive feature: the fricative g sound or the voiced velar fricative. This makes Aklanon one of the most difficult to learn among the languages in the Visayas. Aklanon shares a similarity with Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan and Polish, among a host of other languages. The fricative g sound does not exist in the English language as we know it today.

Grade II was when we had our first lessons in English as a language. We learned the alphabet but the concept was alien to most of us. Some of my classmates never really saw an apple, much less tasted one until much later.

Having been forced to learn in a language whose culture is alien to us, most students are unable to develop the ability to express themselves. Add to that another layer of difficulty, being taught by people who themselves were having problems dealing with the language they teach in. The educational system eventually gagged on incompetent teachers who graduated under the Continuous Progression scheme that was in place then, churning “graduates” who were not even half-baked (alternately softheaded) professionals who did not know any better if their head got stuck in their rear ends.

About a decade later, Filipino was introduced as the medium of instruction. This was, without a doubt a very nationalistic move. Today however, with Filipino as the lingua franca of the educational system, most young Aklanons cannot even write a decent sentence in their native tongue. In fact, the use of Filipino has edged out a lot of other languages and dialects in the Philippines. This reminds me of Hogen, the language of Okinawa, Japan. When they were forced to adopt Nihongo, the younger generations lost touch with their rich language and dialects. Today, only the old people of Okinawa Ken speak Hogen. Today, the younger Aklanons are barely literate in Inakeanon.

The most valuable lesson I learned about learning English came from my favorite teacher in high school who told me to “think and dream in English”. Since then, my introspections have always been in English.

I developed a fascination for the English language even before I went to school. I used to watch my grandmother play Scrabble with her friends. It was from watching them play and listening to them argue in English that I developed an appreciation and love for the language even as I only had an incongruously uncertain grasp of grammar and spelling.

From scrabble, I learned vocabulary and images.  From my English teachers from Grades II to VI, I learned to develop a feeling for words, for their deeper meanings, their power of suggestion.  In writing themes I learned how to paint with words.  Little did I know that later in life, I would write through the night on an ocean of coffee, see my articles in print not just locally but internationally, and literally, write for a living.
.