i remembered this particular conversation in the bus with a fren.

i hope he reads this. haha.


we were happily talkin abt everything and anything.

den he turned to me and said,

he : you're not very good at malay are u?

me : *puzzled* why u suddenly say that?

he : cos u've never talked to me in malay before..

me : haha. so that means i'm not good at it?


well, there's more aft tt, but it's more of incessant bickering.

and that's definitely not the first time i got that kind of comment before.

which i really dun understand why.

i do not speak with this fake omputih accent i keep hearing these days.

when u hear me speak, i sound malay.

and regardless of how rojak i am, i look malay.

it's there in my IC too.

most importantly,

i was brought up speaking malay.

i rem my arwah datuk asking me to memorise one pantun after another,

back then when i was in kindergarten.

i came from a neighbourhood primary sch in bedok, where everyone spoke malay.

i rem my first day in cedar, that feeling of trepidation i got because everyone spoke english.

i could only muster a 'yes' and 'no', thinkin i sound too weird in english.

i rem thinkin that cedarians were a bunch of stuck-up gerls cos they spoke english

with that air of... haughtiness. (haha, sorry my dear girls. i was only 12 then. =p)

and i've never really lost my grasp of malay in sec sch.

in fact, malay's prob the only subject i did well in. haha.

i even wanted to be a malay teacher..once.. upon a very long time. heh.

lastly, i got distinction for both my malay and higher malay in o levels.

so there. hrmph.


my only prob, is that,

i understand formal malay and pasar malay.

but, i can never ever ever in a million gazillion years understand 'metro' malay.

i came up with that term cos i simply cant put together the lang

youngsters these days use as pasar malay. cos it simply isnt.

i took me goodness-knows-how-long to understand wad 'setep' really means.

and de many many weird words ppl use these days.

but i am getting better, although when i try talkin like tt,

ppl normally burst out laughing.

and when ppl talk like that to me, half of the time i dun understand

wad they are talking abt.

watching re-runs of anak metropolitan still cracks me up.

why do ppl actually think they sound cool talking like that?

i think that kinda lang started either aft i stepped out of sec sch

or i was mixing ard with ppl who don talk like dat.

hmmz.

wadever it is, if that is considered a flaw,

den yea. i am not good in malay.

altho personally, i think that the ones not good in malay are the ppl

who talk like dat.

it's no wonder students perform much worse in bahasa melayu in schs now.

tsk tsk.

to my fren, you are not tt good in malay are u?

haha. u noe i'm kidding.