Just seen the Power TV news for the first time. Well for the first minute or so, it was great, news in English! Lots of local news that doesn’t normally appear in the English paper. However, it quickly became obvious that it’s written by a high school kid or such like. The standard of English is terrible, who writes the stuff??! While the female presenters pronounciation was reasonably good (if, unfortunately Americanised), some of the grammar was absolutely terrible. I assume that this is aimed at the English students, rather than the English speaking foreigners here, which is pretty scarey, what are these kids going to learn! During the news, we were also treated to a visit from Igor (Egor?!), a foreinger, presumably Scandinavian. Well it was nice to have an accent other than Taiwanese/American, but Christ his English wasn’t great either, I was having trouble trying to figure out what he was saying half the time, must be pretty depressing for English students who I’m sure got about 5% of what he said. Well Igor gave us a load of bull for about 30mins, lectures us on morals, and how we should be careful when choosing a boy friend etc etc. Why of why don’t they hire a native speaker to look over the scripts?! I’d almost do it for free but, even as a native speaker, I don’t feel qualified to write news reports which will be used to educate the masses! So, whilst it was nice to get the news in English, I didn’t bother with the second half and don’t think I’ll be making any special effort to tune in again in the near future. Nice try, but put just the slightest bit more effort in and it could be a winner, and hire a foreigner (other than Eegor)!
No Igor isn’t a Scandinavian, but actually a Russian, and as far as I’m aware (so a friend who has worked with him tells me) he was hired for his Mandarin skills, not his English-language ability.
So go figure that one … more power to you! (or is it them?)
What channel is it on, and what time is it?