FINISHING SCHOOL

Pronunciation. Does it matter?

There's an obsession among the certain quarter of (Malay)sians netizen to correct people so-called 'wrong pronunciation' of English words. Liaise should be pronounced lee-ase, flour is fla-wer. Oh you get the gist.

I think it's condescending to correct people's pronunciation, because to be fair, we are a country that uses English as a second language, and another way of pronouncing certain words only goes to show that we learn English from reading, and not from communicating, which in itself is a good thing, and also, we speak English in certain ways because of our accent. 

That being said, this reminds me of the time during our last semester in university where we had to complete our Finishing School to graduate. In Malaysian universities at least I guess, we have to attend Starting School in our first week of studying back in semester 1, and a Finishing School during our last semester. 

In Starting School, they wanted to see your baseline English level. Meanwhile in Finishing School, they wanted to see if you're prepared to take on the world as you're leaving the university. And also if you've elevated your communication skills during your whole 4 or 3 year run.

It was a bummer because me and Hafifi registered late and our Finishing School was on the last weekend before our thesis submission. We lost a valuable crucial time to complete our thesis. 

So right from the start, I already had reservations about the whole thing. We couldn't really concentrate during the 2-day commotion because we were thinking of our unfinished thesis, and on top of that, I had to postpone my driving test.

We had two lecturers to assess us, Dr Aida from Faculty of Computer Sciences and Dr Syed Agil al-Sagoff, the infamous (lol) Principal of Kolej Kelima.

Fundamentally, Finishing School is just a group exercise. You got into a class of 25 I think, then you are divided into smaller discussion groups. All exercises require you to speak up, and the activities included presentations, role playing (?), forums, debates and so on and so forth.

So you know, since it was all in English, right off the bat during the inception, or the ice breaking you began to recognise certain characters - the English-is-my-first-language people especially. They dominated the discussion, because unlike the majority of the students, they didn't have to translate the questions into their mother tongue, think of an answer and then translate the answer back to English. These English speaking people cracked jokes in English, and they began to bond with each other because their English fluency was the common denominator that united them. 

Dr Aida learnt their names in like, 2 minutes in, even before the formal ice breaking session. You know these people, being loud is their introduction. 

Their confidence sometimes conflated with their ego. The way they think that their answer was the best, well hell yes because there were no other answers because no other people were answering, was shown in their cockiness. 

My take on the whole Finishing School was I was only going to engage when it's necessary, I wasn't there to make friends or have fun. It was just another class for me. I wasn't going to be loud just for the sake of being noticeable. I was too occupied thinking, or rather, panicking about my thesis. 

I remember Dr Aida told us she was strict in speaking only English with her youngest son, to the detriment of his Malay. He failed Malay even in first year in school.

There was this silent girl in the class, who impressed Dr Aida during the introduction because the way she pronounced 'collaboration'. She pronounced the first syllables as 'ke-la-bo' while we usually simply pronounce it as 'ko-le-bo'. Dr Aida asked her to pronounce it twice, "See how she pronounce the word? She is something" she said. She was the silent star of the class, she was not talkative but her English was great. 

During a forum exercise, there was a girl who pronounced 'host' as 'hose' which wasn't very noticeable if not for her stopping and thinking for a while if she said it correctly. That was hilarious. For context, she said "Hi welcome to our forum, I'm your hose for today." And then she stopped and her eyes rolled when she tried to think of the right pronunciation. That made us gag.   

So there was this another exercise where we have to select a hero and convince the whole class to vote for our hero as the best. The winner of this exercise was promised reward by Dr Syed Agil, unlike other exercises. The rest of them chose one of the 6 (at that time) prime ministers, while my group chose a very local hero - Abang Amirrudin Abd Rahman, the university prime debater. Heck I chose him and convinced my group to choose him, because without a phone with internet to Google infos (it was 2011, smartphone hasn't gained traction yet in that particular month, or maybe I was too poor to buy one) I didn't want to go on debating something that was completely out of my depth. 

I couldn't even recall any of the Prime Ministers' policies in detail, let alone their background, so choosing them would mean suicide. How do I convince people to vote for something that I am not convinced in myself?

Since I chose abang Amir as our hero, my group selected me to be the representative. So I had to rotate to every other group, convincing them to vote for abang Amir as our hero. We were given about 2 minutes at every group to explain our selection. Since I knew abang Amir personally (we stayed at the same block and he coached me during my short stint in Debat Kemerdekaan) I could at least take on another angle to the whole debate.   

The climax of the exercise was the winding up of the arguments, where we have to speak in front of the whole classroom before the voting. I explained that we need somebody close who we could relate to. The English-is-my-first-language speakers went to sentiments with our Prime Ministers, about how their heroism led us to the country that we were. Which was not wrong, but somehow fell flat in the Finishing School atmosphere. 

And here was the surprise, during the voting I received the highest votes, tied to another English-is-my-first-language speaker. And the funny part was, Hafifi raised up his hand to break the tie, giving me the win, because he wanted me to share the prize with him lol. 

I won my prize, and went on to share it with Hafifi when we got back to our college. (It was a tin of assorted biscuits if you wonder) 

I didn't take the class seriously, I didn't get the full 5 star (or was it 4) at the end. But who cares, this was only a pre requirement to graduate. But winning over the English-frst-language speakers when I wasn't that serious boosted my confidence. It doesn't matter if you're not fluent or you speak in an accent, or your pronunciation is wrong, as long as you get your point across. A local hero, an obscure persona winning the votes over national heroes, was to me showed how knowing your subject as opposed to just go with the most obvious ones could make a difference. 

(Just because it was long ago and I wish to remember, I'm listing down people that I remember from the class - Hakimah, Dafi, Ian err sorry I couldn't recall the rest) 

With that I bid my farewell. May we meet again and do pray that I have the time and mood to blog again lol