I've been singing praises of my HTC Desire ever since I got it earlier this year.


Android Market is chock-full of fantastic apps, ranging from calorie counters to GPS-based running trackers. I admit to have downloaded both apps to aid in my quest for health and fitness, and I don't apologize for it one little bit.

I've downloaded gaming apps as well. One such game is Words With Friends, which is pretty much a Scrabble rip-off courtesy of those folks at Zanga.

I've often fancied such 'thinking' games over mindless shoot-em-ups. Which comes as an unpleasant surprise to me that I'm getting trounced left, right and center ever since I started playing WWF.



This got me to thinking: has my proficiency in the English language dropped that far, or am I just imagining that it has? On further reflection, I'm inclined to believe that it has.

Sure, one may say that my experience in WWF counts as a single anecdotal piece of evidence, but I've got another few anecdotes up my sleeve that all point toward the same conclusion. My oratorical skills, for one. I've noticed that when I'm teaching my undergraduate students, I tend to stumble over relatively-simple words which I have hardly troubled me before.

Sure, one may say that a few linguistic stumbles during what is essentially a Powerpoint presentation is entirely forgivable. However, for me that just isn't good enough. I was once the most-capped debater (and de facto captain) of the class debating team back when I was in Upper Secondary. Sure, you may laugh now, but to paraphrase Bill Shankley, the Gan Eng Seng School Inter-Class Debates were a matter of life or death. We all took the debates seriously, having a total of ten debaters.

On top of that, I’m not trying to blow my horn here, but I was my secondary school’s top student in English, and I topped my JC class in General Paper.

In fact, speaking of Words With Friends, I actually represented my class (with Wai Mun) in the Inter-Class Scrabble championships!

So, what happened, Fudge? How did you slide down from becoming extremely fluent in English to getting your derriere kicked in an Android application?

Well, I’m thinking that there is no one single explanation for the rot. Rather, it’s more of a confluence of several different factors which can be summed up as:

1. National Service

I know what some of you are probably thinking: ‘Why blame NS, Fudge? You’ve only got yourself to blame for not maintaining your fluency level while you were in uniform.’

Well, that may be true, but let’s face it: while you’re in camp all sorts of negative influences tend to rub off on you. For one thing, you have to live with people from all sorts of backgrounds with a poor grounding in the English language. I’m not trying to engage in cultural snobbery or anything here, but let’s face it; army camps aren’t exactly the hotbeds of literary excellence.

It doesn’t help that your legendary BMT platoon sergeant has a penchance for including at least one profanity in every single sentence that exits his mouth, regardless of mood. An example being:

‘KNN! That was a f**king good performance, you bleddy f**cking f**ckers!!! CCB… keep up the f**king good work!!!!’

You get the drift.

2. The end of The Anthology of Seasons

To the uninitiated (and the vast majority of you fall within this category), The Anthology of Seasons is my (unpublished) collection of (truly laughable) poetry. It detailed pretty much every aspect of my life from when I was an Upper Secondary student to when I became a freshman.

In a manner of speaking, poetry was an addiction I once had.

'Hi, my name is Fudgie, and I'm a poet.'

'Hi, Fudgie!'

In other words, it was The Web of Fudge even before there was a Web of Fudge. And it was in verse.

Anyway, after seven years, ten A’Zone hardcover notebooks, and nearly 400 poems and songs, I pretty much gave up on it. It’s a tragedy when I think about it, but I simply ran out of steam after all that time. The unfortunate thing about me is that I can only maintain inspiration for so long before it totally gives up on me.

The unfortunate main consequence of the demise of the Anthology is that I had lost the main means of using the English language creatively. While the Web of Fudge rose from its ashes (okay, not quite, the Anthology went on for a few more months until it died), writing my thoughts in continuous prose just isn’t the same as writing it all in verse in that you don’t really have to think as hard while doing the latter.

One may argue that writing in verse has its drawbacks in that poetic licence allows for grammatical aberrations to allow for better flow and verse continuity. In other words, I was allowed to make grammatical errors if it made the poem sound better, and that was what I did on occasion. Still, I hold that the stimulation of my creative side far more than made up for any (willful) errors in grammar and vocabulary I made for the sake of verse.

3. Been getting too busy

Yes, that’s right. I’m falling back on the same old excuse of ‘been too busy’, only here, the full form is more of ‘been too busy trying to maintain my proficiency in the English language’. Which is a lame excuse, of course, and I’m not disputing that.

A specimen of Ohmy whatadorkus in its natural habitat.

However, I’m also not disputing that my all-out assault on the academic front is costing me much of my free time. Time which I normally would spend on reading lots of good books, be it The Three Investigators (when I was in Upper Primary/Lower Secondary) or Tom Clancy’s Ryanverse and Op-Center series (from Upper Secondary onwards).

If anything, even the time spent on the Web of Fudge has significantly gone down. In the past I could write 1000-word socio-political commentaries ranging from things like the death penalty for drug traffickers to the role of Islam in inter-racial dialogue. Now I’m dealing with far more banal issues and talking about them in shorter entries with ‘dumbed-down’ language.

4. Lack of a willful effort

I take full responsibility for this point. It takes a considerable effort to write and speak the English language fluently, and that was something I used to do on a near-constant basis in the past.

At some point, though, I pretty much let go of the reins and paid less attention to what I say and write. It wasn’t really a conscious decision to do so; it was more of a gradual transformation that crept up on me from behind.

So, you’ve identified the problem, Fudge. What do you plan to do about it?

Well, for starters I’m going to have to get back to the bare basics of what it means to be fluent in any language. Simply put, I’m going to have to re-immerse myself in the English language. To be fluent in it, I have to do my very best to be fluent in it in any situation, be it writing a blog entry, teaching my undergraduate classes, or talking to my professors.

And then I’ll….. well, that’s about it. Seriously, how fluent you wish to be in any language boils down to how well you use it. I never had to read lists of bombastic heavy-duty words back when I was in JC. If anything, I frowned on such a strategy. After all, if you were prone to making simple grammatical errors, a sprinkling of bombastic words would only serve to make you look worse.

So….. here’s to me being more fluent in the English language.