//beconfused

Japanese man tries to learn English from the movie Matorisu - I mean Matrix. I have to give him credit for the number of syllabus having to be output in each line of English sentence. I hope he understands what’s his reading. I don’t know what does “vagaries of perception” mean. What’s “insipid”.

Oh mai godo, mai Engulisu isu beiri de no gudo.

[Direct link to YouTube.]

Matrix Subtitles

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why? Why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know?

AS: Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.

AS: You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Neo: Because I choose to.

Really, I think that’s a nice try.

The television programmes in Japan are just so strange. These Japanese are learning English in the form of aerobics. It sounds silly to me. This one’s Zuiikin English.

The women hear recites, “Take anything you want”, “Spare me my life” and “I was robbed by two men”. They do aerobics too! This segment is called ä¸?è§?ç­?�?�ã??ã?©ï¿½?ã?« (Sankakukin Trouble or De ltoid Muscle Trouble):

View the above video through YouTube.

The men are trying to learn the phrase, “Jaa sonna wakede.” And yes, they do aerobics too. It’s horrible!

View the above video through YouTube.

Spare me my life!

[via TV in Japan]

These are English translation are found in a Fuji Japanese Restaurant.

* The pan is burnt dark winter one
* The pig stews the curried meal to eat definately
* The cold Joe’s wheat

Read all the rest of the mistranslation at Voxeros’s blog - JayWalk.

Can’t guess what those are? I can’t read Japanese but I can understand the Chinese characters.

They are actually:

* Pan fried Udon (a type of noodle)
* Curry pork chop rice set meal

Er… I don’t know the third one. And the reason why things are translated to ‘eat definately’ is due to the word ‘å®?é£?’ which is literally translated to fixed food. It means set meal if I’m not wrong. It looks as though those guys used Google Translate or something.

Check out an Ajax dictionary at Dictionary.hm.

I see how these Ajax things are getting more interesting already. It’s not the best Ajax implementation that I’ve seen, but Dictionary.hm does searches quite well generally.

My only complaint is that it seemed slow. A progress bar would be good. It would be even better if it can suggest the words that you are typing too.

We ought to embrace our local chat language more. The local chatting language is an ultra-sophisticated form of language that only the youngsters understand. We don’t use much afk, lmao, imho or l33t5p34k. We just have lots of lars, lors, hees, mahs and absurd abbreviations and a bunch of misspelt words.

I don’t know how that come about; it probably evolved from Singlish and got mixed with the modern internet lingo. I recently watched this show in Channel U, a Chinese television channel, that got a bunch of people debating on the whole Singapore internet lingo thingy.

The whole segment was… bullcrap. I disagree with most of what they discussed. They went to discuss about internet lingo with Chinese language. Oh comeon, no one chats in Mandarin in MSN Messenger in Singapore. It’s all English, Singlish and Chinese words depicted in Han Yu Pin Yin (still English).

I just don’t connect with the show segment you know. The argument is that teenagers are increasingly getting into this - what is widely touted online as - cool lingo and the parents all don’t damn understand what they mean.

The parents are naturally annoyed, upset and displeased when teenagers type words through MSN with strange spellings. Grandparents are upset too. But the segment just went on showcasing the various scenarios where frustrations set in on strange chat lingo that parents face.

Yes, it is a problem but it’s one with no solution. Teenagers love the lingo, if you use it, it’s like you’re part of the club kinda thing. I wasn’t really one of those who use such language excessively as I didn’t start chatting with local people. So my exposure is those American type of lingo. It took me a month to get used to how all my friends speak online.

If parents are really interested, just go to some teenager chat room and start talking to the teenagers, I’m sure it won’t take long to learn that anyway. I don’t see what’s the fuss too. I just think teenagers have absolute right to chat in a language that is common to themselves. If parents don’t understand, just learn. If you can’t learn, just don’t.

I just don’t see the importance of learning the Singapore chat lingo anyway. And when they can’t learn, they got frustrated that their children and go to some talk show and lament about it. Get real, that’s really childish in my opinion. If your child decides to speak French to his clique of French language student friends, are you going to go to a talk show and complain? Just start a blog and complain lar, like me lor.

I saw Cockroach’s result slips and I was quite jealous of it. He did pretty well in my opinion especially in terms of class ranking. Well, my school results… Let’s just say that they aren’t really the thing I am proud of. My parents weren’t pleased with my results. They (the results of course) kinda sucked.

I wasn’t good in many subject. Take a look at my results and you’ll probably figure that I’m below average.

(My result slip during secondary 4, mid year. Click to enlarge.)

I am consistently lousy in Chinese language. My English is crap even though I’m at position 8 as my reading is the one that saved me - I can’t write English, but I can read them all out to you.

And my geography… I made good pals at the geography remedial class with the 2 fellows who fail too - and guess what - we sit side by side.

I never really undertstood Mathematics, I got good results sometimes and lousy ones on other times. Before I entered secondary 4, my Additional Mathematics’ results was 29/100, that would be a miserable F and I almost got kicked out of the class. Physics and Chemistry was nothing worth mentioning too.

And I brought the same result slip you see back home. Note the positions in my class. I got scolded quite badly and my mother thought - and still think - that I am a bad student. She tells me to do better and play less computer games. I don’t know why she has an impression that I was playing games anyway.

There’s nothing great about my conduct too, my teacher finds everyone okay and give a good remark. In the end, I graduated from secondary 4 with L1R4 score of 12, L1R5 score of 15 and entered a polytechnic which I later didn’t do too well.

As seen in Jessica’s blog. I decided to give a try on what type of American English would I be speaking.

Does this mean that Singapore English is near to the general American English? It is for you to decide I guess. I think we watch a lot of American television shows though. Things like American Idol, The Apprentice, CSI etc. are all aired right here in Singapore, just that we get all the episodes slower.