Remember 'The Rock' to remember 'perkarangan'

In Malay, there is a difference between 'pekarangan' and 'perkarangan'. The first word means 'halaman rumah' (the backyard or court yard of a house) while the latter carries the meaning of 'having to do with batu karang (coral). 'Perkarangan' invariably goes with 'kawasan' to form 'kawasan perkarangan' (coral area).

I usually teach my students to differentiate the two by asking them to remember 'The Rock' (one of the famous wrestlers) which in Malay is 'batu'. This is because 'r' which can be linked to 'The Rock' for easy remembrance appears in 'perkarangan'. By remembering this, students should have no problem telling the two words apart.

Let us look at how to make sentences with these two words.
1 Aminah sering mengekalkan kebersihan di pekarangan rumahnya. [Aminah often maintains the cleanliness of her court yard.]
2 Para pelacong terpesona oleh keindahan kawasan perkarangan di Pulau Redang in Malaysia. [Tourists are fascinated by the beauty of coral areas at Redang Island in Malaysia.]

Use your electronic devices often

I have this experience of not using my electronic devices such as laser disk player and VCD player only to find that they cannot function anymore. On the other hand, the DVD writer that I bought and used very often is still kicking and providing good service to me. It just proves that if an electronic device is left idle for too long, the chances are it will refuse to work when we want to.

The VCD player that I own right now was the third one I had bought. The earlier two could not function after some time because I seldom played VCDs with it. The moral is use it very often and every part of it will be functioning well until it reaches its life span.

Rafting down Pahang River

Have you been on a raft before.

Well, I have. During my stay in Jerantut, I had the chance of rafting on the Pahang River with my colleagues who taught in the same with me.

One day, Tan Pek Seng, a temporary teacher told us that the aborigines had left a raft afloat after having transported the rattan from the forest to Jerantut for sale. Usually, they would leave their raft in Jerantut and went back by bus.

We planned to raft down the Pahang River. As a safety measure for me, I wore a life-jacket because I was the only one who was not good at swiiming.

On the way down Pahang River, we could see birds and iguanas all along. Pek Seng navigated the raft with the help of a bamboo pole.

It was quite risking sitting or standing on a makeshift gadget like this. I dared not imagine what would happen if the raft were to disintegrate. After an hour's slow journey we finally arrived at the nearest small town and went ashore. Then we went back to Jerantut by bus.

Thus ended the memorable journey on a raft down Pahang River

Many, much and a lot of

Students often get confused as to the correct usage of 'many', 'much' and 'a lot of'.

In this post, I am going to explain how these three words are used.

'Many' is used to state the number for concrete things or things we can see and count and we do not want to specify the exact number. Hence we can say that 'There are many cows in the field.' and 'Many people can be seen exercising in the botanical garden.'

As for 'much', it is used to describe things in great amount. For example, we can say 'There is not much sugar in the bottle.' and 'I don't carry much money with me.' However, the nouns after 'much' is uncountable.

'A lot of' can be used for countable and uncountable nouns. Look at the following sentences to see what I mean.
1 There are a lot of apples sold in this stall. [apples are countable]
2 I spent a lot of time trying to sort my CDs out. [time is uncountable]

Tomorrow is Duan Wu Jie again

The sight 'chang' or rice dumpling reminded me of Duan Wu Jie which is tomorrow. As we don't have many members in the house, we just bought some changs for praying purposes.

Actually chang has its history in China. Once there was a Prime Minister who was very loyal to the Emperor in China but he was scandalised by another mandarin officer of high ranking. His idea for improvement of the state fell on death ears as the Emperor listed to the other mandarin officer.

The Prime Minister in question was Qu Yuan and later he jumped into Milo River ending his life. When the people heard of his death, they quickly stuff rice into bamboo leaves and tied them before dumping them into the Milo River in the hope that the fishes would spare the corpse of Qu Yuan after eating the rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. This food was later known as zhongzi in Mandarin or chang in Hokkien. The people also made a lot of din by beating drums to scare the fishes away as so to keep the dead body of Qu Yuan intact.

So much for the legend of Duan Wu Jie or Chang Festival.

How do you key in data when your keyboard fails to function?

I was in the midst of keying in something when my key failed to function. Whatever I typed did not register on the screen. I disconnected the keyboard and reinserted and still the stubborn keyboard betrayed me.

Luckily my mouse still functioned as usual. Then it dawned on me that I had to make use of my mouse to do the 'keying in'. This was what I did to 'key in' what I needed for a document which I needed to e-mail to my friend urgently and I could not get the keyboard replaced as it was near midnight.

First I opened any word file from which I would look for the letters and numbers needed for my task. For example, when I needed to key in the word 'please', I would search for the the letters p, l, e, a, s and e and copy each one by one because it might not appear in a single word and paste it to where I wanted it to appear. My mouse came in handy. All I did was to highlight a letter, right click my mouse and click 'copy', then bring the mouse cursor to where I wanted to key in and right click again and click paste. Although it was time-consuming, I managed to 'key in' what I wanted.

I hope this tip will benefit readers who happen to be in the same shoes as me some day.

How to use 'tentang' and 'terhadap'

Malay has its own grammatical rules. Some users of Malay often use 'terhadap' (towards) when 'tentang' (concerning) should be used.

In this post, I will deal with these two words and their correct usage.

Briefly, the kata sendi nama (preposition) 'terhadap' is used in front of 'nama konkrit' (concrete nouns) and 'tentang' is used in front of 'nama abstrak' (abstract nouns). Perhaps the following sentences will make this clear to readers.

1 Kerajaan akan mengambil tindakan keras terhadap mereka yang terlibat dalam vandalisme.
[The government will take harsh action against those involved in vandalism.]
The pronoun 'mereka' is visible and tangible.

2 Sebagai ibu bapa, kita harus mengambil berat tentang kebajikan anak-anak kita.
[As parents, we should be concerned about our children's welfare.]
The noun 'kebajikan' (welfare)' is abstract as it is invisible and intangible.

So much for today's dosage of Malay grammar.

How to use ‘being’ to replace verbs-to-be

For variety in our writing, we can always make use of ‘being’ to replace verbs-to-be such as ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘was’ and ‘were’ in our sentences. In this post I am going to show readers how to do it.

Let us look at how we can write the same sentence using ‘being’ to replace verb-to-be in a sentence. These are the examples:

1 When I was there, I felt very happy.
Being there made me very happy.

2 As I am slim, they like me.
Being slim makes them like me.

3 When we are hungry we eat whatever is offered to us.
Being hungry, we eat whatever is offered to us.

4 He is rich and he enjoys a good life.
Being rich enables him to enjoy a good life.

I hope readers will try their hands at making two sentences of the same meaning as I have shown above.

Teaching Science is Fun

Although I am now engaged in language teaching, namely English and Malay, I was originally trained as an Integrated Science teacher. I enjoyed being a science teacher because I got to see my pupils having fun doing the experiments themselves. Initially, Malaysia adopted Integrated Science where students had a chance to do the experiments according to worksheets, write down the outcome of them and write out conclusions. They have hands-on throughout the three years of this curriculum.

Even a thermometer fascinates a Form 1 student. They will be measuring temperatures of water being heated and those of liquid being cooled down. Sometimes they fight over the use of thermometers that many of them drop and break to pieces. They are usually asked to pay for the damage as a way to reduce breakage.

There is one experiment when I ask a volunteer to place his hand on the dome of a Van de Graaff Generator to see the working of static electricity. The students' hair will be standing on ends just like me in the photo which I showed them. My sister had the photo and she kept it as remembrance. They will always remember this experiment.

I also enjoyed cutting out live cow's eyes to show my students the various parts of the eye. This act also backfired on me when kamma caught up with me. You can read about this in my earlier posts under the label 'Religious Matter'.

The pin-hole camera which the students have made really makes them understand better the principle that light travels in straight lines.

All in all, both the teacher and his students enjoy Science if experiments are allowed to be carried out, as the saying goes 'I hear and I forget, I see and I remember but I do and I understand.'

How to copy large files to DVD

In my earlier post, I taught readers how to copy files larger than 2G to DVD,that is using INCD. This method is troublesome when we need to access the files in another computer with no INCD installed. Of course if you have INCD Viewer, you can still read the files even if you don't have INCD installed.

I am going to teach readers another way of copy files larger than 2G which can't be handled by Nero under usual normal file-copying. You need to download a software named Burning Largebackup To Dvd which can be downloaded at http://www.filefactory.com/file/agfa49d.

After installing this software, you select the files larger than 2G to be copied to your DVD. The program will split the files for you and if you required two DVD's, it will help you to copy to both disks. Furthermore, it has a restore program to rejoin your files when you need it later on.

I have tried the software and it works.

Happy copying large files using Burning Largebackup To Dvd.