"I Eat Already"

Many Malaysian English students get a headache when we come to English tenses. We make all the possible grammar tense mistakes that throw even our fellow Malaysians into a puzzled state.

Today, we shall focus on the usage of 'already' in Manglish and how we can untangle this tense problem.


The use of 'already'. (Source: Wikipedia)

d/dy/ady/edy/ridy/oledi	Derived from the word "already". Often used in online chatroom by the youth in Malaysia, although in speech, speakers will often pronounce as 'ridy'	I eat 'd' 'loh', I eat 'ridy', I eat 'oledi'

When Malaysians use 'already' in sentences, what they usually meant is to show past tense. The word 'already' can be derived from the direct translation of the Malay word usage of 'sudah' to show what happened in the past.

It is not easy for the Malays, Chinese, and Indians to learn the English tense as the Malay, Chinese, and Tamil language do not have any 'tenses' like how it works in English. It is much more simple in Malay, Chinese, and Tamil when one refers to an action according to its time. There isn't any verb conjugation at all in those languages.

So how can one replace the Manglish way of show past tense instead of using 'already'?

Homework: Revise on simple past tense. Give examples of regular verbs and irregular verbs for our next class discussion.