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| Burst |
It's because we don't read a lot of English stuff. The same reason why most of us don't speak Tagalog well. And anyway, what we see mostly on TV and in movies are tampered Tagalog, not the real McCoy. So don't think watching Tagalog stuff on TV makes you good in Tagalog. Well, sometimes they produce something real and deep Tagalog, but they do it strictly for movies depicting history, like pure Tagalog is good only in the past. That's the impression created.
Read English books. Don't limit yourself to reading English labels and captions and ingredients in grocery items. Most people read only the headlines of English newspapers. I started with reading detective mysteries for kids and then gradually advanced to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock pocketbooks. Familiarize yourself with characters' dialogues, how they speak and act. When it's become a favorite hobby, you find no difference between books and movies. You "watch" them both.
With videos becoming more easily available to us today, the less we read books. We rely on watching than reading stories and that develops passive thinking (and may make them prone to dementia, say some experts). Watching videos or movies makes us passive--simply accepting things as bible truths without stopping to reflect on their validity, or if the portrayal does justice to real life. That mindlessness adds to our inability to comfortably talk in another language other than our vernacular so that when we try to, we stutter or slur or simply freeze.
The result? We can't quickly assemble words to express ideas in our minds. Sometimes, we do the same with Tagalog or Filipino. We have the idea but we can't translate them into sentences applicable for meaningful conversations. Why? Because our minds are not used to doing quick conglomeration and assembly of words to give form to ideas. Our minds are lazy. We just want to laugh at something funny. We don't step back and analyze why we found it funny and articulate that in our minds. Plus, our society has taught us not to criticize. We're told it's bad.
Well, some folks use criticism in stupid ways. They just want to outsmart others, period, prove themselves better. It's pure self aggrandizement. Honest criticism is weighing how close things are in the movies to real life. Many times, I see people laugh at jokes that are not funny. Though "funny" is something subjective, there should be a hint of something really funny about it somewhere. Like, merely spanking somebody is not funny, but you see some folks laughing at it really hard.
Moreover, millennial culture makes us all "text" rather than talk to our friends. The use of emoticons and GIFs makes this worse. I mean, you convey a whole idea without actually speaking out your thoughts. We lose our ability (and creativeness) to talk, our ability to express ourselves by composing words and putting our personality and individuality intact in them and then speaking them out. It's among things that make us human and unique individuals.
Instead, our use of uniformed emoticons and GIFs and text messages that shortcut everything make us lose our individuality and just melt in the faceless anonymity of the crowd. We don't like exercising our minds to think and question and get to the truth and voice that out. We prefer to click on a button that produces a uniformed response and saves us from using our brains.
So we speak carabao English. Instead of saying, "You're invited to have lunch at our place," we panic and become rattled (because we're not used to doing this) and say, "You eat our house."
