gunakanlah bahasa kebangsaan kita. marilah amalkan ramai-ramai

as usual, i have an assignment due soon but what better way to procrastinate than by typing something totally unrelated to the assignment!
and this may be my final i-blog-because-i-don't-want-to-do-my-assignment post
writing this down makes it sound so official!
i'm leaving the land of the long white clouds soon!! aaargh!!! T________________T
i will wrote about leaving sometime soon.i hope. *cough cough*

anyhoo
We had a special guest lecturer for our EPSY 320 : Teachers as lifelong learners class today.
She's our new Student Attache from MSD. she's a graduate form otago uni and has been teaching for 23 years.
amongst her advice to us as beginning teachers were to "go against the system" "keep on making lesson plans" and "sentiasa ikhlaskan diri, remember your rewards at the hereafter".
something else that she said of my interest was about being proud of your nationality. well, she said something about being a Malay but she did mentioned something about being a Malaysian.

now, now
what makes you said that you are a Malaysian?
is it because you were born in Malaysia?
because one of your parent is Malay?
what about the non-Malays?
how can you differentiate Malaysian Chinese from Taiwanese or Malaysian Indian from those from Bangalore?
when you are away from your country, how do you identify other Malaysian?

one important distinguish feature is the ability to speak Bahasa.

Ever heard of the phrase/song "Bahasa Jiwa Bangsa?"
How can you claim that Malaysia is your land, that you are a born and bred Malaysian if you can't even speak in Bahasa?
i'm not saying that you should be able to speak perfect bahasa (hey, i'm even contradicting myself here as I'm writing in English)
But at least you could understand bahasa and could speak fluently
It's okay to speak in your dialect etc as long as you used it.

But our mother tongue has been increasingly forgotten
I have to confess that I do have relatives who couldnt speak/ refused to speak in Bahasa
Some of them speak in English because if they speak in Bahasa they will speak in their regional dialect while some of them just refused to speak in Bahasa.
which is sad, really.

Truth to be told, i was never aware of how special it is to have your own language until some of my classmates mentioned it to me.
You see, those who has only one language i.e English are jealous of us
they are jealous of our language
because that's our identity
and that's the language that only we could understand.
it's special.
it's ours.
hence, it is important to keep on using it
so that it wont die (yes, language can die)

treat Bahasa with respect
appreciate the beauty of the language
it doesn't makes you appear less intelligent if you use perfect Bahasa
you will look sillier if U wrItE liKe DiS