Reading

I've kept a book called Starbucked on my book shelf for a month now, without even reading the first page. I bought two books a month ago, both are two different genres. Starbucked is a more serious book and all about guidelines and how to(s) in business. Where else the other one is 10 Things I hate About Me, a chic lit book. I've finished reading the chic lit first, of course. I would choose a novel over a serious looking book any time. But I heard Starbucked is very good, so I decided to buy it. I've never pictured myself reading this kind of books but people change. In fact, Starbucked is my first serious book.

You can really see the obvious genre difference just by looking at their covers, right?? Finally, a prove that we actually can judge a book by it's cover (because I always fall for nice pretty book covers)! Anyway, seeing that I've finished the novel, I was thinking of starting to read Starbucked.

But, my finals are starting next week and my first paper is Asas Pembudayaan Kusahawanan(Basic Culture Entrepreneurship), so I had to put Starbucked back on my book shelf, and started reading this :

Hundreds of pages of this. It contains 11 topics altogether and it's in Malay. I know I am a Malay myself but I had the hardest time understanding what the book has to say. Despite using Malay to talk (which was not proper Malay anyway), the real Malay language is actually really complicated. I never thought Malay is this hard! The last time I learned Malay language was in secondary school and I didn't remember coming across words like "kompetensi" in the text book or the Literature books.

The sentence that I'm most confused about is this : "lokus kawalan dalaman". First, I don't even know what lokus means, is it suppose to be like locus or something?? Second, what does the whole sentence even mean? And third, I don't even know how to pronounce it. Is it 'lo-kes' or 'lo-kuus'?? I ended up memorising the whole sentence without knowing what it actually means. I know, I know, I shouldn't be calling myself a Malaysian any more. So embarrassing...

However, this made me realise that we Malaysians don't use our own language that often. We should be proud of it like the Italians and French people do to their own languages. I'm not saying we should not use English at all, but I think we should balance it out. But not by mixing those two languages together, of course because then, it'll be Manglish, not proper Malay or English. We should talk in Malay as much as we talk in English. To me, language is the most crucial asset in a country. It shows our culture and why shouldn't we be proud of our culture? We should!!

But of course, don't go all Malay on a European tourist asking you the directions to KLCC. Know when and where to use those two languages and to master both of them is really good.

Don't be like me. I'll be crying and running back home when someone asks me what "kompetensi" is. Not a very good Malaysian advising other Malaysians to be proud of their own language, right here. I should be dedicating this post to myself...

How sad.

How about you guys? Do you prefer Malay or English??