Going Through Hurdles

I never thought of being a person to practise law. Thats the last thing on my mind at certain point of my early life reason being that its kinda of hard for me to read Law during my studies in university. Perhaps, reading Laws courses is exposing myself to law books, law journals, articles, books, philosophy and other documents that all written in "ENGLISH". Frankly speaking, I am not good in English during school days.

For first year in Law courses, it took me forever to understand the Law jargons and terms used. Not only that, its kind of difficult for me to condoned an idea of "there is no right and wrong answer" kind of thinking as in Law Student. During school days, we are taught of what is right and what is wrong. We were never being exposed of any "grey" area... let alone on how to deal with it. To be honest, during my university time, I know "nuts" about the whole concept of taking law subject except on how to pass its exam.

However, I have to admit that reading Laws in english sometimes interesting. We learned a lot of new words everyday, new phrase and of course new way of thinking. But the thing is that most of our Law in Malaysia were adopted from Indian Law (being colonial states like us too). Even most of our lecturer in university are from India or within the same region of countries.

Being a naive person I am of not really understand of most of the subjects, I normally just keep myself busy writing down notes of whatever the lecturer said in his or her lecture. I had this one scenario happened during my 2nd year of reading Laws. I went to my Law of Tort class which the lecturer is from Pakistan. Being a person from Pakistan, he had Pakistani accent and some of the English pronounce word are different. First few days of lecture, he always tell us story of cases and he normally starts with :-

Lecturer : The platipus in this case.......

At first most of us thought that it was a terms "platipus" that he use in his lecture. So we tried our best to presumed on how to spell "platipus" for our handwritten notes. No one seems dare to ask what he actually meant by "platipus". Everyone seems satisfy or understand what "platipus" means.

After few days lecturing, one of my classmate raised his hand and asked, what actually he meant by "platipus". The lecturer just smiled then he said :-

Lecturer : Mind my accent, OK I write on the board.

Then he wrote the word "Plaintiffs" on the board and says :-

 "this is what I meant. Its platipus!"

After the explanation, reading Laws are far more interesting than before.... and I went through all the way.

Other's Opinion

I like what this guy says about PPSMI. I got it from other blog. Read it :-

Recently there is a lot of support calling for the reversal of teaching math and science in English. 

Much of these support comes of intellectual who has never studied any form of science or math in their respective college or University. 

Take for example the recent PPSMI forum which was supposed to be attended by Anwar Ibrahim but was replaced by Syed Husin ALi. 

Syed Husin Ali is a Professor of Anthropology and Sociology from University Malaya. What science or mathematics is there? In fact I had to look at the dictionary to understand the meaning of Anthropology.

The anthropologist Eric Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences."

Zaidel describes Anthropology as a major you take in Uni if you can't do Math well but want to seem smart by having fancy words on your degree. 

And Anwar Ibrahim? Degree in Malay Studies, Oiyoooo the only Math they have in Malay Studies is to calculate the amount of credit you take per semester which isn't much of a problem for Anwar because during his Uni days he spent most of them shouting slogans on the street and getting angry for no apparent reason. 

Why I say getting angry for no apparent reason? Because later he Joined UMNO!! 

Back to thw reason why I support the damn thing. 

I came from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and trust me when I say this that a few years back this was the most Bahasa Kebangsaan University than any other local universities combined. Let's just say the first 3 years of my Engineering days were filled with Bahasa Malaysia/Melayu jargons. Just to show you what I mean take a look at some of these examples..

Engineering Term 

Capacitor - Pemuat

Resistor - Perintang

Impedance - Galangan

Current - Arus

Others include : Momen Lentur, Tegasan, Terikan, Pepejal, Dinamik Haba and etc... 

I mean those Engineering Lecturer took the extra mile to translate every single damn thing into Malay and I greatly respect this. As oppose to my sociology lecturers who like to screw up the Malay Language by prostituting English words into BM. 

Take for example this term "Dekadensi Moral" When I first saw that term I was thinking what the hell is dekadensi moral, a type of resistor or something? Turns out Dekadensi comes from the English word Decadence. Dekadensi Moral means Moral Decadence direct translation where as you can simply translate it into "Kemerosotan Akhlak/Moral" which is much more clear. But NOOOO he had to use dekadensi so that he would seem smart and people won't question his Associate Professorship. Then you would have other words like kompak, visi, misi, infotainment, naratif kecil, naratif besar and penkek. 

At first the Lecturers (Engineering) seemed to get it all good, they managed to translate the English term to BM very well and with very clear meaning. Then Things started to change as the subject get's more complex and you get newer terms. Take for example this Subject..

"Motorolla 68000 Microprocessor"

Which translates to Mikro Pemproses Motorolla 68000" 

Sounds fine....

But then as you go deeper into the subject you will find more interesting terms. For instance

Timer - The clock cycle chip you use to send timing signals to the processors. It acts like a stopwatch to the processor. 

BM Translation - Pemasa. Which is fine.

Then we have things like this - 

Bistable Multivibrator - Dwimantap Penggetar Pelbagai. Apo Kobondo tu Jang? 

Then in microprocessor you have this term call "Interrupt" and like it's name it means to interrupt the normal cycle of the processor and tell it to focus to doing something else. Kinda like the phone rings when you are cooking, you stop cooking and answer the phone. 

The Malay Jargon Interrupt would be Sampukan. Interrupt Pin - Pin Sampukan.

Sampukan? Sampuk ke? Sejak bila Mikropemproses ada pocong atau Jembalang dalam dia? Ini Electrical Engineering ka Bomoh Engineering? 

Masked Interrupt - Sampukan Bertopeng. 

Handshake Interrupt - Sampukan Jabat Tangan. Ko salam dengan dia lepas tu ko kena sampuk, kira dia ni macam santau laa. 

Then you have this thing called "Latch" which is an output chip. 

Latch in Malay is Selak. 

Selak as in Selak pintu, Selak Pagar or Selak pintu Jamban.

Mula-mula baca dulu saya ingat Selak dalam erti kata Selak Kain. 

Contoh - Angin bertiup kencang lalu baju kurung Fasha Sanda pun selak sikit lalu Zaidel pun telah menerima ganguan emosi akibat dari kejadian itu. 

Naah see,

And it gets interesting when it comes to "Electrical Power" Subject. In there there is this chapter where they talk about CoEnergy in power transmission. Coenergy in malay is translated to Kotenaga.

Which is why when he gave the lecture my lecturer would loudly proclaim KOtenaga compare to the students who prefer to pronounce it as KOTEnaga. 

3 phase Coenergy in power transmission would then become

KoteNaga 3 fasa dalam penghantaran kuasa. OIYOOOOOO, kalah Anakonda! 

Just for fun here are some other Technical Jargons you can play with...

Transformer - Pengubah

Decoder - Penyahkod (Mak Nyah kot)

Multiplexer - Pemultiplex

Polarity - Kutub

Instruction Set - Set Suruhan

Components - Peranti (I bet you didn't know that) 

Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) - Penghantar Penerima Pemasa Serentak Am 

Now try translating this

Connect Your Joy Stick into the server Port, you should find little problem with the Joystick as the server has Plug and Play mode. 

Masukkan Kayu Ria anda ke dalam lubang pelayan, anda sepatutnya tidak mempunyai banyak masaalah dalam memasukkan kayu ria anda kerana pelayan ini mempunyai fungsi masuk dan main. 

Hambik kau! 

Tu belum dia kena sampuk ke selak ke nak nak pulak ada kotenaga. 

By the time I was in my 4th year,

Everything was taught in English.... SENANG!

PS:- Kalau betul nak buang PPMSI, aku nak propose buat mata pelajaran sekolah ikut bahasa Sarawak pulak!

Nothing Much

Days and nights are moving pretty fast nowadays. I hardly make much progress... seems things are not moving any much quicker, as fast as days and nights. During old days, it seems that things are moving much slower and I normally eager to wait for night to come as the good TV shows only being transmitted at night. You name it :-

1. The A Team
2. Mc Gyver
3. Street Hawk
4. Night Rider
5. Airwolf
6. Mission Impossible
7. Hulk
8. BJ and the bear
9. Dallas
10. Remington Steele (hope spelling are correct)
11. and many more...

Everyday we have all sorts of TV series.. and its only shows at night. To wait for nights to come everyday, its like having a pain state of agony. Days are running its daylight pretty much slower than today. Anyway, thinking of slow... nothing can compare with our broadband (self- proclaimed) speed that we are currently subscribing. Am using stremyx at 2MB download rate and 512kb upload rate... but it took me forever to upload these :-

Elisa & Darwisy

My Wife & Darwisy