Ganbatte ! You can do it, Xingyi !

You see Xingyi, the problem with having a poor command in English will result in people having to clarify things with you over and over again.

Let's take the minutes that I have edited for that colleague, L, as an example to prove my point. L spent one whole week trying to compile some minutes for a long meeting. After that, L passed to me to help her do some vocab check. When I first got it, I was like totally stunned by what L wrote.

For example:
CEO wants Jim to liaise of WebAsia handling the reports to go through.

Like this kind one lor ! I had to ask L to explain to me in Chinese and in the end it means:

CEO expects Jim to liaise with WebAsia on the Report Creation module, and then go through it before launching.

It's like L never elaborated on the tasks so it altogether doesn't sound logical to me.
Not only that, L likes to act smart and change a word into a synonym that none of us commoners understand.

For example, do you know what elucidate means? Peter elucidates to CEO that there will be a need to purchase more servers to support the software.

L can just go highlighting any word L wants and change into another synonym of choice, and at times the synonym just wouldn't fit into the whole paragraph; Either the nature of the word is too strong or too weak for its purpose in the sentence. So it became an interview session with L to clarify what L really wants. It's freaking pekchek lor.

But L really made an effort to improve during the past 3 months. Nowadays when L asked me to check the vocab, I see it is almost near perfect! Being one who do not usually compliment others (you can ask Kalene, she'll vouch for that), I found myself complimenting L nowadays because the improvement is really significant. At least I really understand what L wants to express.

I guess commenting that your English sucks is not a very encouraging statement. For that, I apologise here to you in front of everyone.

Sorry Xingyi !

To correct my former statement, it is the way you express your sentences that I feel is wrong. Sometimes it feels like the sentence structure is directly translated from Chinese. All languages have their sentence structure one mah, you'll really have to catch the drift, the flow of the sentences, to be able to write proper English. One humble advice which I normally do is to read novels or any short stories.

Nuff said, hope I don't let you have the impression that I look down on people who are lousy in English. I myself have to overcome a huge deficiency in my Chinese vocab too. Just that in the society nowadays, where English is the mainstream language used in corporate communications, we cannot afford to make silly mistakes. You haven't heard about my Indonesian Project Manager hor. That one lagi 吐血. After so many meetings she still don't get what our requirements for certain things are. In the end, my colleagues from the other departments do not feel like meeting up with her when we need to have meetings.

So well, I hope you are able to stomach what I say lor. Not trying to change or judge you but I feel that it's for your own good. =)