USApinoy.com

It was May 27, 2005 when I came here to the USA on a fiancee visa. I may be nearing my third year of stay now but I sometimes still feel lost when talking to some folks here. They have words and phrases here that I feel awkward to say, words and phrases like …

• “I’m good ” when somebody asks me how I am. I feel like good should only be used to denote a trait like bad boy, good girl, that kind of thing. I usually just say, “I’m fine, thank you ” as we all have been taught in school.
• ” Have a good one “. I feel it’s not a complete sentence, like it lacks something… like a good “what” ? I feel much better if I say ” have a good day/ evening”.
• ” Talk to you later” or “See you later” . When somebody tells me “talk to you later” , I ask myself, ” will they be talking to me again later today or when ?? ” Just doesn’t make sense to me. Later for me means later today, not tomorrow, or the following month or what later for them means.
• “What’s up? “. The sun?

Some American terms doesn’t make sense to me sometimes.

Click here for more of those slang words .

Oh well, for lack of better things to do…

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One time I had this very short conversation with a delivery guy when he came to drop-off a a parcel to our company. I wasn’t sure he was a Pinoy so I asked him.

Me: “Filipino ?”

He: ” Yep”

Me: ” Tagalog ? ”

He: ” Yes”

Me: ” Ah I see. Pacencia na ha kasi minsan kahit mukhang Pinoy eh di pala marunong magtagalog so hindi muna ko kumikibo. ”

He: ” I know Tagalog , I speak and understand it but since you know English, and I know English so let’s just talk in English.”

What else can I say? In my mind, the words of Dr. Jose Rizal kept ringing, “Ang di magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa sa mabahong isda… ” .

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A friend of mine, a fellow Filipina who grew up in the Philippines like me, once told me that her son now that he’s a bit older, has started correcting her English grammar. Her son, being born here in the US, has learned the English language so well that now, he has the audacity to say , “that’s wrong grammar Mommy..”.

I have other friends who have children who would laugh at them when they commit some grammar booboos. One time, we visited a friend and his family, both Philippine born, but whose two children were born here. They had a guy come in to do the measurements for their new blinds. Our friend, the father, cheerfully said to the guy, ” Hi guy, how are you doing ? “. I don’t know why he said it, but for whatever reason he did and so his 9 -year old daughter said, ” did you just say, Hi guy, Daddy ?” and she was laughing so hard in front of all of us, even if the guy was right there behind us. I had to hush her to stop her from making fun at her dad.

My son is only two years old and I know that time will come when he would also laugh at my Filipino kind of English. I try hard to be always grammatically correct but you know it’s not our language and so there are times when we would really slip and we forget that the verbs and the nouns should agree and all those things, singular, plural, whatever. We forget what is the correct pronunciation too, or the right “twang” or how to say it exactly as the Americans do and the worst part is forgetting the right word to use. My friend’s daughter would laugh at how her mom would say, “awesome”. She laughed at me how I said “Google ” (googool?) .

I just hope that when my son grows up, he won’t catch my grammar, diction, pronunciation or whatever errors because I will lose my credibility if that happens. But if he ever does catch me “murdering” the English language, he’d just have to excuse my kind of English because I wasn’t born in the USA like them , right?