Hong Kong English/Cantonese (XIX)
Pardon my English
My English is bad. Hope you can see this.
English lessons are “life-changing” in Hong Kong’s education system. It serves as a platform for the students to find their alternate egos. It was the class to formally learn a new language, thus a new way of thinking and even develop a new personality. (People say learning a new language has this kind of effects, but I’m too lazy to find articles to read and see if these are scientifically proved.)
However, everyone’s learning abilities are different, so are their language abilities. That’s basically why English abilities varies among Hongkongers, and we have TWO Hong Kong English accents (Lam, 2017) rather than one.
We still have faint memories of the English lessons during junior primary school. We still remember that a character in the English textbook called Beeno is a cute flurry yellow dinosaur-looking alien who came from outer space and he/she/it (I forgot the pronoun for Beeno, sorry.) can fly.
The reason Beeno comes to the Earth and learns English with a bunch of school kids namely Peter, Mary, Betty, Charlie and a few more is written in a Primary 1 reader, but it was more than 20 years ago for me and I remember nothing about the content of that book.
During junior primary school we learnt some basic English phrases such that we can use them more often when meeting English-speaking foreigners, supposedly gweilos and gweipos. Therefore, those phrases are overlearnt by now.
For example, I don’t know what else I can answer to a “How are you?” other than “I’m fine.” (Yes, Hongkongers aren’t very polite and we don’t like to say thank you). So probably don’t ask me about it.
There is also an overlearnt phrase which is an answer to “How do you go to school?”:
I go to school by bus.
I remember we learnt this in Primary 1 together with other means of travelling such as “on foot”, “by car”, “by taxi”, “by train” and so on.
However, this phrase has another usage for netizens in recent years. It was used as a comment to posts that are pretty nonsense. People may also reply posts using this sentence to troll people as they think that the post is ridiculous.
As this new usage to the sentence is becoming more commonplace, we also can see that the university students are using this in their posters for some fun events as an English translation (to mock). It seems to me that people drop this phrase to warn people in advance that their English isn’t very good and they are afraid of speaking with you using English.
But generally Hongkongers’ English competence isn’t too bad, especially the younger generations. We started learning the language in kindergarten and would not finish learning to refine the use of the language until the years of public exams.
The only thing is that a number of local people aren’t confident enough to speak English. They can understand well but they are just scared of making mistakes. Perhaps this lack of confidence can be eased by more encouragement?
Anyway, as a matter of fact, I barely went to school by bus. Traffic jams in morning peak is too horrible that it makes bus journeys unreliable.
And I hope one day no Hongkongers would comment in a fruitful English post using “I go to school by bus”.
References:
Toni Lam (2017) Intonational variation in Hong Kong English: a pilot study, Asian Englishes, 19:1, 22–43, DOI: 10.1080/13488678.2016.1277411