Home » Archives » 12. May 2008
Despair
May 12, 2008When a man sees everything through a window of despair, the world can be pretty mangled. I’ve seen a short mini-series (13 episodes) anime titled “Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei (Goodbye Professor Despair). It’s not your traditional twinkle eyes anime. The show portrays how people have been complacent with a warped life that we ironically consider normal. It has an alternative style and totally not a cute kid’s anime.
There is an episode where a girl in the truest sense of obsessive compulsive tries to put everyone “in their proper place”. She argues that if a man earns (in converted currency) P6000, doesn’t have the right to own a plasma TV. In congruence to the statement, the salary left would only be enough to rent a room. Imagine a small boarding house room with a plasma TV.
It was utterly stupid to imagine because no Filipino would do such a crazy thing. But on second thought, we actually do! Many of us own absurdly expensive phones with features we don’t’ use or we absolutely have no idea how to use. Honestly, who has used their MMS to send pictures? Or who has ever sent emails using their phone? And seriously, have you subscribed to “the latest news delivered straight to your mobile!”? The phone is as expensive as it gets and spending another peso for its features would bleed our pockets to shock.
Extravagance has been part of our culture as rice has been to our meals. We essentially “save” money to buy novelty, even luxury. I don’t even think we know the true sense of “saving”. If we “save” to buy something, then we practically didn’t “save anything at all. Makes sense huh?
A Chinese once told me, a Chinese would only spend P1 if he had more than P10, but a Filipino would gladly spend P10 even if he only had P1.
Cannibalize
Cannibalism is a good thing. It depends, however, on which you consider edible and palatable. I have decided to cannibalize my students’ blunders and post them in this blog.
Hangul, or the Korean alphabet, does not represent most phonics available in English. This was the case in the old Philippine alphabet, Alibata (A-ba-ka-da-e-ga-ha-i-la-ma-na-o-pa-ra-sa-ta-u-wa-ya). If you’ve noticed our old phonetic system lacked the letters represented in English as the letters “c”, “f”, “j”, “q”, “v”, ”x” and “z”. But since the Americans taught us English in colonial times, our familiarity with the English vowels is close to natural. There are some remnants though of our inefficient phoneme system like, “zero” is pronounced as “jero”.
Koreans suffer a heavier ordeal. Since most of English consonants are absent in their phonetic system, their English pronunciation suffers. Take the letters "f" and "p" in English is considered the same or is represented by only one symbol in Hangul. Ok, ok enough of the gibberish. Here are the examples:
me: “How’s your weekend?”
student1: “I went to potty” (I went to a party)
me: “How did you go to the Philippines?”
student2: “in eflayne” (in airplane)
me: “Is the word ‘imagine’, noun?”
student3: “Hmm.. No, it’s a bulb”
me: “A what?”
student3: “baaaalb” (ah…verb!)
me: “Have you been to People’s Park?”
student4: “Yes, the fuck is good” (Yes, the park is good)
me: “Good Lord”
Of course not all Koreans suffer this problem. Most young students who enroll in Philippine schools improve their English pronunciation significantly. Those who’ve studied English for a long time has gotten the hang of English pretty well. But I’ve got to say their tongues are good meat.