06 January 2012

Suria Berita

For someone like me who is trying to learn Malay, especially when I have so few oppourtunities to actually speak the language in Brunei, one of the greatest resources is Youtube.

I have found the postings of extracts from the news by the Singapore Malay-language channel Suria particularly valuable because they include subtitles. Mostly, the subtitling is pretty good, but occasionally there are errors, which can be quite confusing. For example, in this clip from a news item from September 2009 (see here) about a chap called Res who was given tickets to the F1 race in Singapore, the third word seems to be Is.But that can't be right, as Is is not a word in Malay. In fact, it should be ia ('it'); and the sentence means 'But it must have been a highly valued gift for Res, a loyal fan of F1'.

I guess people who are more fluent in Malay would not even notice the mistake.