老鼠洞 Mouse Hole

Actually I’m quite satisfied with Malaysian’s English proficiency. We have many elderly that could speak well English because of colonial education system. We may say that nowadays the youth could not speak English well, but we are evaluating them using native speakers’ scale. We are not native speaker of English, but why can’t the Malaysian tolerate with our less-perfect English? It may because half of Malaysian using English as their education medium. So, they treat themselves and other half of Malaysian as English native speaker. So, they grade those who could not speak and write well as low proficient in English. Yeah, maybe indeed we don’t speak and write good English, (indeed good is not enough, because I once had a teacher saying that the language used in local press were dull) but we are progressing, in our small way. As we look at most of the Japanese, they do not speak well in English (maybe they write well, but who knows?), but they do not feel ashamed of themselve...

Every media is criticizing our undergraduates do not have ‘soft skills’. The media claims that the reason our graduates unemployed is that our graduates do not know how to communicate with other people, to cooperate with team members, to sell themselves as a product in the real world. ‘Soft skill’, as defined, is the ability to communicate effectively, build rapport, persuade people of your position or ideas without alienating them, get along with a wide variety of people, be an effectively contributor on teams, and lead teams to achieve exceptional results. ‘Soft skill’ for me, is actually the wisdom of life. We cannot learn it from book, maybe we know the theories of it, but it is another thing when we practice it. The reason our grads lacking this ‘soft skill’ is that our grads are overprotected by all parties, including their parents, schools and also government. Since when finding a job became an national issues? Our nation also suffered a few economic crisis throughout hist...