English Fun

The English language has its root in many diversed dialects spoken around western and northern Europe. It is the first global lingua franca and is the dominant language used in communications, science, business, aviation, diplomacy, etc.^[1]

On the other hand, English is also notoriously known as a ‘borrowing’ language of great flexibility and irregularity. In terms of both spelling and pronunciations, there are always more than plenty of examples that can bring people into blaming English for its ‘imperfection.’ (However, there were other people who believed that English was actually far from the only language in the world with non-phonetic spelling and irregularities.^[2])

I, as a non-native English speaker, actually found loads of fun when studying English spelling and pronunciation—especially when putting those irregularities side-by-side for comparison.

Below are some poems of English that ‘showcases’ how complex English pronunciation rules can become:

This Phonetic Labyrinth

A fun poem about English pronunciation

[6 May 2006, Singapore]

Flying attended a language skills workshop, titled Improve Your Spoken English (a.k.a. Brush Up Your Spoken English), lately. Although I had always been quite proud of my knowledge on ‘correct’ English grammar and pronunciations (at least I know how they should be, thanks to the way the English language was taught in China), I was a lot less confident on my spoken English when it comes to day-to-day conversations.

Curious enough, however, I was not the only one who had difficulties with spoken English. I was surprised to learn that many Singaporean, despite of being brought up in an English-based education system since childhood, had not learnt proper pronunciation of English words at all, not to mention the IPA notations. Worse still, many of them even claimed that the workshop was the first time they got to study proper English tenses and grammatical structures!

How ironic this is!—While Singaporeans have notoriously low standard of education in Chinese language (all thanks to the government policy since her independence in 1965), we now also learn that many Singaporeans are not that much proficient with their English, either.:^P So much for the bilingual/multilingual hype—It’s just Singlish, after all...

Here are some lists (with the context of English usage in Singapore) that I have collected since my arrival in Singapore many years ago. Hope these can serve as a simple revision guide for non-native speakers like me.

Commonly mispronounced words

Commonly misspelt/misused words

Common Singlish expressions

(I no longer maintain the last list. There are more informative ones on the Internet now.^[3][4][5][6])