Malay has been designated as the most important medium in communication in Malaysia, hence I learned almost all the subjects in this language. This is why I face difficulties when writing in my engineering classes because the work has to be written in English. Let’s take the tutorial for MLE 1101 as example. There are a lot of scientific terms that need to be remembered. The problem is that some of the terms are the same as Malay. For instance, atom is the same spelling for both English and Malay. However, there are many words that sound alike but their spellings are different. We have carbon in English, but “karbon” in Malay. It could be quite confusing whenever I try to understand the concepts or principles. Thus, it will take up a lot of time when solve the problems.
In order to solve this problem, I have listed down all the common errors. By comparing the English term with Malay equivalent terms, I find out there are common pattern for the difference between English and Malay. For example, the “s” and “k” in Malay words would be replaced by “c” in English. This is why I got process and “proses”. Despite of that, the “c” is either being omitted or replaced by “k”. Nickel and “nikel” would be a good pair of example. Figure out of all these has helped me a lot when writing work for my MLE.
Besides that, tenses can be quite troublesome. This is because the lab report should be written in past tense. Nevertheless, we do not have tenses in Malay as the verbs do not indicate when the actions occur. Since there are so many types of past tense, write a good report seem to be mission impossible to me. The only way to improve this grammar mistakes is to read more scientific articles so that I will not do the same mistakes again. To build up a strong basic, I would like to do more exercises to get myself more familiar with the English terms and tenses because i believe that practise makes perfect.
