The ubiquity of English in the rest of the world

The Taiwanese use English as an unofficial second language, with varying degrees of success. If locals use the English translations on signs to learn English, it explains a lot. They all sound like machine-translations. But, never mind the signs, what interests me are the t-shirts.

A significant proportion of the young population wears some sample of English on their t-shirts. Some of these have simple grammatical errors like subject/verb number agreement, and you can easily see what was intended. Chinese has no agreement between subject and verb, so it’s also easy to understand why this is a common error.

Some, however, just don’t make any sense at all, and you have no idea what was intended. Word salad – with seemingly random words, and sometimes random isolated letters – English can have “a” by itself, why not “k”? Even when something is grammatical or a near miss, though, it often just makes no sense anyway.

Occasionally you see something that is just wildly inappropriate for a t-shirt, and you figure the person has no idea what it actually says. This morning in the park, on a girl who was maybe 12 or 14, I saw this: “Purefuckin Canadian. Born in Canada. Made in Italy.” (Give Google a week or two, and this post will surely be the only hit in the world for the phrase “Purefuckin Canadian”.) (Maybe not – maybe this is the hot trendy new brand.)

And a few days later, a guy on the MRT had on a shirt with sillhouettes of a donkey and an elephant. The elephant's sillhouette was filled in by an american flag motif. The donkey was ... mounting the elephant, from behind. The caption said, "F**cking syndicate". Now, nobody hopes more than I do that this November, the Democrats give it to the Republicans straight up the jacksie, so to speak, but I have no idea if that's what the guy meant. I doubt it, but who knows?

I can’t get pictures of this phenomenon without… well, walking up to someone and taking a picture of their chest, which will certainly have unintended consequences, whether they’re good or bad.

We’re both lucky and unlucky speaking English as a native language. On the one hand, we have no trouble understanding discourse in the common language of commerce and culture, or at least understanding why it’s unintelligible. On the other hand, we never had to learn it. People will say that English is the hardest language in the world to learn, which isn’t true – it’s all a matter of how different it is from your native language. It’s really close to German, and a really long way from Chinese, which has tones, no number agreement (and if I spoke more than about 15 words of it, I could tell you all kinds of other things that are different.) Since we do speak the international language natively, we tend to be (more than) a little lazy about learning another one, with irritating consequences. Imagine how the immigration debate would be different if basic fluency in Spanish, which is our second national language, were required for a high school diploma? I’m not talking ability to write essays, just a basic thousand word vocabulary beyond “¿Donde esta el baño?”

The bright side of trying to learn English here is there’s no end of opportunities for one to practice listening ability, as recorded examples of native speakers speaking it are cleverly disguised as Hollywood movies. (And they all have Chinese subtitles, if you want to see if you were correct.)

It also makes for a great opportunity for work for native English speakers. White ones, that is. Ev's native speaking roomates, who happen to have asian ancestry, couldn't get hired by the English schools. But, the minute you walk in with a white face, you're hired, I'm told. They told me about a German guy, who learned all his English in Taipei, who managed to get hired. Irritating that this bias exists. I assume the schools are catering to the biases of the parents of the students.