I really haven’t been following the news closely lately. I must have focused too much of my attention coming up with the gossip piece on the matter of Edison Chen Eidpr0n Chantuk, drooling over the new version of ping.sg and following Obama’s progress in the Democrat primaries.

It has been almost a week since I started reading some of the blogs in my RSS and I noticed this piece on DK’s, where some Taiwanese were criticising our English accent, and our enunciation of English words on a variety show over there.

I am quite sure some people would felt really outraged, and have already retaliated by pointing out that either they probably aren’t as fluent in their English (i.e. England also not powderful). But in my opinion, what’s the use of pointing out the obvious? After all, that would leave us in the same boat as speakers of ‘lousy English’. It doesn’t matter that we vary in the degree of ‘lousiness’, but I simply cannot even understand why we need to even respond to defend ourselves in that matter. After all, most of us aren’t native speakers of English, nor is English our first language.

But what is even more amusing is that non of us realized that some Taiwanese has a very peculiar accent when speaking Mandarin too. For e.g. instead of saying 我很幸福 (‘wo hen xing fu’ – which means: I am very blessed), some times you hear 偶很姓胡 (‘ou hen xing hu’ – which is literally meaningless).

We watched some Taiwanese productions and generally we know there seems to be a common problem in Taiwan to mix up the ‘f’ pronunciation with ‘h’. For e.g. 饭 (‘fan’, which means rice), is pronounced as 唤 (‘huan’), and 福 (‘fu’) which is pronounced as 胡 (‘hu’). And I recalled that we used to joke about Stephanie Sun [孙燕姿] wanting her boyfriend to be of the surname 胡 (Hu), since she has a song called 我要的幸福 (‘Wo Yao De Xing Fu – The Happiness I wanted) which is mis-pronounced as 我要的姓胡 (I want the Hu guy).

Now, we don’t joke about such things on our variety shows, do we? Even though, in my personal opinion, we really had even more to joke about because of the fact that they can’t even speak something that’s supposed to be a native language properly. And this isn’t even the usual 十 (‘shi’, meaning 10) and 四 (‘si’, meaning 4) pronunciation problems we normally have.

Granted, they speak their native Taiwanese as a first language, but still they are a Chinese people and wouldn’t it be even more pathetic if you can’t speak Mandarin well? That would put them in the same league with this angmoh market research guy I know, who speaks Mandarin with a really funny accent.