What? No football to talk about today?

I was incredibly bored today. Especially brain dead after finishing reading through 2 journal articles, no mean feat for me since the total number of journal articles I had read over the past 5 weeks is a hugely impressive 3. I am slowly confirming my belief that I am not smart, just hardworking. Throw me a well laid out textbook and I can absorb very well. Give me a journal article which is not clearly structured (at least to me) in the sense that there is no reason a, reason b, reason c which causes XXXX, and I struggle to make any sense out of it. Really I am just reading and underlining without any real understanding of what I am supposed to know and whether I AM supposed to know them at all. Not sure how I can cope with the exams even though it is an interesting course.

First Theorem of the Economics of Studying:

"There is a fundamental tradeoff between how interesting a course is and the amount of work you have to do"

TosH (Nov 2004)

My progress in going through the articles (using going through instead of reading as the latter requires more effort which I did not) was pretty rapid during the afternoon given that I had a mini virus scare and ended up scanning my lap top like 4 times in total which meant that I could not do anything with it for a few hours. However, my progress got significantly slower as the day went by.

Second Theorem of the Economics of Studying:

"Law of diminishing returns exist in studying. As you add more of the variable factor (information, textbook, articles) to the fixed factor (brain) the marginal product of the variable factor (learning) eventually declines (i.e. you end up just going through words)"

TosH (Nov 2004)

As if others had not already found out. Duh.

But yeah so I began to do some surfing around the net again and I began to go back archives of the column that I liked in Straits Times and came across the following article:

From: Straits Times

July 26, 2004

Wait, I forgot my accent

When an American friend visited me recently, I was forced to speak with an accent. I wasn't trying to be cool - I just wanted to be understood

By Karl Ho

STRAIGHT TALK

RECENTLY, I found out that I swing both ways.

Linguistically speaking, that is.

When I banter with friends here, I speak like a typical Singaporean.

But when Eric, a long-time friend from the United States, came to visit earlier this month, I found, to my surprise, my intonations running amok the moment I opened my mouth to greet him at the airport.

'How's it going?' became a bewildering 'Hau's id GO-urn?'.

'What are you talking about?' morphed into an incomprehensible 'Wad-er ye TAWK-in aboud?'

For some strange reason, I started speaking more slowly and my brain seemed to take a longer time to translate my thoughts into speech.

Worse, a long-lost American drawl - and a very cringe-worthy one at that - started rearing its ugly head when I spoke to my American buddy.

But when I got to talking to my local friends later, I sounded Singaporean again.

It was then that I realised that an age-old affliction had come back to haunt me: Bi-accentism.

This word, which I coined, will probably not make it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

But bi-accentism is a word I think has meaning to many of my peers.

Because, like it or not, many of us shift linguistic gears whenever we move from talking to Singaporeans to ang mohs.

And unlike a certain local celebrity whom I hear got his American accent while working at a Subway restaurant here, I'm not trying to be cool when I adopt a twang.

I'm just trying to be understood.

It's the same with a friend who works in bank relations.

She says she changes her accent all the time when dealing with foreign clients.

'I'm like a walking United Nations of accents, but my speciality is the English Northern accent,' she says.

'Once you stress different consonants or syllables, they'll not understand you,' she adds. 'And I can't have that because I'm reading them important numbers and instructions over conference calls all the time.'

MANY of the Speak Good English campaigns here are based on the presumption that once you toss out Singlish and speak grammatical English, everyone will understand you.

Well, when I spoke up in class at the American university I studied in in the mid-1990s, I made sure there were no 'lahs' or 'lors'.

But not everybody understood me anyway.

That's because in mid-western America, where many people have very little contact with the outside world, much less know where Singapore is, a Singaporean accent is probably as alien to them as a D24 durian.

Eric, my American friend, should know. Although he's had to endure my Anglo-Singlish mutant twang in school and is a three-time visitor to Singapore, he's still getting used to how we speak.
Over dinner one day, he told me about his encounter with a girl from a travel agency while he was booking a trip to Malacca.

'She was going on and on, and while most of the parts I understood, the others, like putting on a sticker so that the tour people can recognise you, I kind of deduced only when she pointed at the sticker.'

He adds: 'My brain just takes a longer time to process the words because the pronunciations are different. But if my friend from the Chicago suburbs were to talk to the girl, he'd be like, 'huh'?'
So, in order to blend in and not stick out like a sore thumb, the young and clueless international student that I was learnt to speak 'American'.

In fact, Peter Tan Kok Wan, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore's English language and literature department, says that 'bi-accentism' is a perfectly understandable social coping mechanism.

In sociolinguistics, there's a theory called 'convergence' where a speaker moves towards the speech style of his interlocutor so as to reduce social distance, he says.

Mr Colin Goh, founder of the satirical Singapore website TalkingCock.com, also professes to be a 'linguistic chameleon' himself.

Currently based in New York, he says that it's easier to be yourself there because 'almost everyone has a different accent'.

Nonetheless, he switches speech patterns when he's with friends in Singapore.

'Sometimes with old 'Hokkien peng' friends, I also become more Beng than I would otherwise be,' he tells me in an e-mail.

To him, bi-accentism is more acceptable than those who affect a foreign accent even among fellow Singaporeans.

'You know the type - lived all their life in Singapore, then go study overseas for a couple of years and come back with a potato stuffed in their mouth - the annoying 'Hellew, dew yew play Polew?' sort I used to encounter when I studied in England,' he says.

'Now, that's a real sign of cultural (and personal) insecurity.'

THEN again, being able to switch accents isn't necessarily the mark of a confident individual either.

I, for one, will readily confess that I still have years to go before I become a truly self-assured man who's not afraid of being himself.

Maybe my haphazard American accent is part of a bigger cultural debate: that despite Singapore's progress as a nation, Singaporeans still subconsciously emulate the West.

It is a topic that linguists and sociologists can debate about.

Meanwhile, I believe that switching accents is the most pragmatic way to be tapped into the global village yet not lose my identity as a Singaporean.

Ultimately, the best way to speak, as Straits Times TV editor Jennifer Lewis will tell you, might be a 'consistent Singaporean sound with clear and precise speech'.

After all, if ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh can cruise through the United Nations with his very Singaporean accent, then why not me?

So if I ever visit Eric at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, I'll try my Singaporean accent there, just for the heck of it.

And if it draws blank faces, then I'll just revert to 'Wad-er ye TAWK-in aboud?'


This is something that I myself had experienced before. But I do not try to talk with an ang moh accent. Rather when I am talking to mainland Chinese, I try to use their kind of Chinese. You know the kind where you need to curl your tongue. When I speak in English to Hong Kongers, I speak in their kind of English. Don't really know how to describe it, maybe a bit Jay Zhou-ish kind of drawl and unclear in pronounciation. When I speak to Malays, I put on the Mat accent, but I don't think I am close to imitating them. They are just, well, too Mat.

I don't know why I do it, but it just comes naturally to me. Depending on who I am speaking to, I try to speak like them. The only exception is with the ang mohs. I CONSCIOUSLY do not use words like "mate" and "cheers" because I know they are used more by ang mohs than by Singaporeans. Maybe I am scared of being accused of "fake". Another reason might be because I cannot catch what they are saying at all. Scottish, Mancunian accents belong to one group for me. Italian, Spanish accents belong to another group. But the common thread which runs through them is I find it hard to catch what they are saying. Instead of the writer's problem where he has to pause and then speak, I have to pause and think about what the other person had said. Perhaps this has contributed to my lack of willingness to interact with ang mohs (exceptions being football fans) for fear of exposing my slowness and also the fear of irritating the other party. And it all becomes a vicious cycle.

Or maybe there is a very fundamental explanation for it all. I am a true blue hawker centre eating, neighbourhood school going, SBS bus/MRT taking Singaporean. The world of RJ/AC and jiak kan dang people just isn't for me.

Mat accent rocks.