I am accused of being a grammar nazi all the time by friends which I find to be funny. I am decent with grammar, but definitely far from perfect. I don’t know all the rules to writing and not all of my sentence structures are correct. I don’t spell everything correctly, and I tend to switch from present to past tense while writing. I never majored in writing. However, I do find it annoying when I am reading blogs, papers, signs, ads, E-mails, Facebook posts, and memes that are just filled with so many grammatical errors. The errors are distracting and my eyes can’t help, but zone in on the areas. I swear, I should just carry a red Sharpie around. I get that people make typos when writing, but when that typo is repeated over and over again, that’s not a typo. That is you not knowing how to spell and having poor grammar.
I have to say that my biggest pet peeves include the misuse of THERE, THEY’RE, THEIR, YOUR, YOU’RE, TO, TOO, THEN, THAN, EFFECT, and AFFECT. What?!? Yep, it drives me nuts! You see, I was one of those English as a Second Language (ESL) students while growing up. As mentioned in a previous post, I am a first generation Asian American. My parents came to the United States (U.S.) without knowing how to read, write, or speak in English. It wasn’t like they were planning on coming over to the U.S. and had time to learn. They were refugees of the Vietnam War. When your homeland is destroyed and your people are murdered by Vietnamese communist soldiers as retaliation for helping the U.S. C.I.A. during the Secret War, I’d bounce too! Fuck that. I’ll blog about that story later for those interested. Back to my original story. Since my parents didn’t know how to read, write, or speak English, they couldn’t teach me this foreign language. I had to learn it by watching TV, reading, and going through the ESL program at school. Major props and shout out to school teachers by the way!
I don’t know about other people, but learning a foreign language is pretty damn hard if you ask me. I took 2 years of Spanish in high school and 2 years in college and I am no way close to being fluent. I can say that I am way better at writing sentences in Spanish than I am at speaking the language. Obviously, not using the language often doesn’t help to retain it either. I was lucky that I was taught English in the public school system when I was ready to be enrolled in Kindergarten. You know what they say, children pick up new languages a lot faster than adults. It was a struggle learning English because my parents couldn’t help me with homework or help me practice English. My siblings were in the same boat as me. The only time I was truly exposed to English was at school and then when I went home, it was back to speaking our native tongue. It was like living in two different worlds. I had to translate everything for my parents, and even during parent-teacher conferences! As a young child, I was so embarrassed. Why couldn’t my parents read, write, or speak English? Why couldn’t I have a normal life like the other students?
I knew at a young age that it would be an uphill battle for me and that I would have to learn everything that I could through school since I wasn’t going to have any help at home. Plus, referring back to the previous blog entry, my parents were more focused on turning me into a child bride so learning English was not a priority. I knew that I had to learn how to read, write, and speak in English if I were to make something of myself in the U.S. I busted my ass learning this language called English. I read as many books as I could get my hands on so I could see the sentence structures and how words were spelled. I had an awesome fourth grade teacher who personally drove me to the public library to check books out since my parents didn’t know what the hell a library was or that books would help me. Since I had to work extra hard to learn English, that is why if I see grammatical errors, it just annoys me. It bugs me even more when I know that the person who is writing and making the grammatical errors only knows English! It just makes me feel as though if that is your ONLY language, shouldn’t you at least be somewhat decent at it? I know the rules to English are confusing at times, but that’s your only language!
That, my friend, is how the alleged grammar nazi came into power.
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