TN50 dialogue: CM takes a dig at Man-glish
KOTA SAMARAHAN: The national education system needs reform, lest Malaysians should fall behind their English-speaking counterparts across the globe.
Chief Minister Datuk Amar Abang Johari Tun Openg suggested this but not before taking a dig at the laughable standard of new generation Malaysians in the English Language.
Recalling a hilarious incident in a showroom, he related a foreigner approaching a Malaysian to find the restroom.
“The foreigner asked ‘Can you show me the way to your restroom?’;to which the Malaysian gamely pointed at a sofa and said ‘There you are’ (blinkered by the word ‘rest’).
“Restbah, so you can have your rest there lah. There was a lack of understanding in English. That poor foreigner really had to hold on due to the misunderstanding,” he said, prompting laughter and chuckles at the DeTAR Putra Hall, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, where the National Transformation 2050 (TN50) Dialogue took place yesterday.
Hundreds of Sarawakians attended the dialogue moderated by Minister of Youth and Sports Khairy Jamaluddin. Several participants also aired their aspirations for TN50.
Abang Johari then posed how the country was going to promote tourism if “English is not there”.
He, however, was delighted that the English standard of Sarawakians was considerably good.
Nowadays, he said almost all user manuals are printed in English.
He wondered how people are going to follow it if they did not have a command of the language in the first place.
“Our education system must be reformed. You keep changing the education minister but the policy remains more or less the same. But when we promote English, they say we are not patriotic.”
Asserting that promoting English had nothing to do with patriotism, Abang Johari said similar status would also be given to the national language Bahasa Malaysia (BM).
“It is compulsory for all to know the national language. Now, (that) China has the economic power, you will need to learn Mandarin. Say ‘wo ai ni’ (‘I love you’ in Mandarin) even if you don’t speak it.”
He said the country’s education system must be ‘liberal’ so that its people could learn to be multi-lingual.
In many more years to come, he said Sarawakians or Malaysians in general would have to look at the whole world as their market, given the borderless digital society.
He added that the world would be moving towards robotics and Malaysians would be left with no choice but to keep up.
“I attended a conference in Seattle in 1992. Bill Gates invited us to see the ‘House of the Future’. When we entered the house, we were greeted ‘Good morning, welcome to the house’.
“But when some Japanese tried to speak to the one who greeted us, they were told ‘I’m sorry, your pronunciation is wrong’. Only then did we realise it’s a robot with no human relationship.”
Abang Johari said they were also led to the kitchen where items would be delivered by the press of a button.
“That is the future and you will see how our lives will be changed. I’ve seen it, the AI (artificial intelligence), that is going to happen in the future. You have to figure out how you’re going to manage that sort of life.”