The picture above got me thinking.

How often do we butcher our words. As I speak English primarily, this doesn't occur too frequently. Most often such pronunciation errors occur amongst people who speak it as their second language.

In Malaysia, the national language is Malay. Having said that, not all Malaysians speak Malay. What surprised me even more awhile back is some don't even speak a word of Malay or English despite living here for years/ their entire life.

I made a video about it. You can find it at the end of the page. Back to the topic today - we cannot fault people like the person above who repeatedly said cocknice instead of clockwise. This is because their tongues are not accustomed to pronounce such "r's" and "ss" (if you can imagine what I'm trying to say).

Let me mention clearly that I'm not making fun of this person or throwing racist jokes against Malay, Chinese or Indian ethnicities who do not speak fluent English. We must always look at things from the other person's perspective.

Taking this person and myself as an example.

I speak English well, he speaks Chinese well.

- no intonational errors in our respective languages.

He speaks England, I speak China.

Do you get my drift now?

In conclusion, let's not be hasty to joke about other people (as funny as it may be) like the story of the auntie who was selling coke but kept saying cock. If you don't usually speak Chinese, instead of saying yi tiu (one piece), you may end up saying ni diu (you F**k).