English?

Bahasa Inggeris or English is not my first language or mother tongue. My first language is Malay and my spoken tongue is the Terengganu dialect. Maybe it is in my blood or perhaps to make up for my lack of numerative skills, I have some flair for language.

I love reading! When in school I like to read anything that I can lay my eyes on. Books, signages etc. At a young age I already have some flair for writing. Malay (both the Rumi and Jawi versions) and English were taught in schools since standard one. And my parents did not object to my learning a language; or another language for that matter.

In standard one, my English teacher, Cikgu Adnan, made me accompanying him to other classes. He taught English. In standard two, a teacher, Cikgu Yusof Ishak, recommended me for a transfer to an English primary school in town. I didn't know why, my father flatly declined Cikgu Yusof's suggestion.

In standard five, I recall a visit by a team of inspectors. They took over my class during the English lesson. They asked questions and asked us to spell words that they said. I could spell correctly all the words a gentleman mentioned until he said, "How do you spell the word "beautiful"?" I knew the correct spelling but I felt overwhelmed by the class' deafening silence. And I was overawed by the smart gentlemen in suits.....Finally I didn't answer it. And he spelt the word for us. I had the correct spelling by my fear overcame me.

After standard six, I was sent to the premier school in my hometown, where English is used pervasively. My friends from the Malay schools became the butt of jokes for our limited vocabulary, funny pronunciations and ungrammatical English.

Not infrequently I asked my father to allow me to drop out of school. He refused. My fear of him got the better of me. I started reading voraciously any books or magazines in English. Not to mention newspapers. Every afternoon, I spent 90 minutes - yes 90 minutes - reading NST (New Straits Times). And I read Newsweek that I subscribed regularly.

In my MCE (Malaysian Certificate of Education) examinations, I answered the Communicational English paper confidently. The question on composition was based on a cartoon by Lat. A sequence of sketches showing a man looking for the right durian he wanted to buy at a pasar malam. the last frame showed him at the hospital with a visitor standing near his bed. Most of my friends just wrote their composition according to the sequence of the cartoon frames. i took a slightly different approach. I wrote of the man telling his visitor how he got into the hospital (using flashback technique).

When the results came out, I was the only one from my school scoring a distintion in Communicational English. To cut the long story short, it pays if we work hard. Now I feel more comfortable writing in english than in Malay although my Malay also good.

English anyone?