Incorrect English in promotions

[Èxsharaèn]

Clâiré might know what I mean

Just recently I was tagged at my friend's photo (actually a digitized brochure) promoting of an upcoming event. At first look, immediately I knew there was something wrong: the two sentences written in English (see if you can find the mistakes):

Are you dare to make something innovative?
Are you think that you are creative?

I know sometimes someone wants to try being so cool by using English, and sometimes people do make mistakes, but I think it will ruin the whole "cool" thing instead when they make mistakes in writing proper English. Well, we don't use English as our native language, but don't make it as an excuse not to write proper English. You learned English for years, yet you make a very simple but fatal mistake by using the wrong modal, even when the sentence is in present tense? That's unbelievable.

What do you think of people using English in their promotions, but make unexpected mistakes?

[Stash]

Are you creative enough to make something innovative?
Do you think that you are creative?

Well.... what I can say is that this kind of mistakes is an expected one, seeing the way they teach us english at school.

In school, they always teach us to
1. Complete the missing words
2. Choose the correct words from option
3. Choose which one is the correct sentence

But they never told us to
1. Write a simple paragraph in english (as far as I remember, I never had a question at exam about writing a story in english, except at TOEFL test)
2. Read a english literature (this is important to see how the native speaker use those modal, use tenses, use V1 V2 V3, etc)
3. Watch an english movie without Indonesian subtitles (English subtitle is still okay, although I prefer no subtitle at all)

Forgive me if I make some mistakes in my reply. I'm not that good in english :p

[Èxsharaèn]

Well, actually the first sentence is wrong too "dare" is a verb or noun, not an adjective Not really, I remember one of the homeworks was to write something (don't remember exactly what to write at that time). And didn't they got one more English class at college? I bet the exams are very different compared to school exams. Actually, at 10th grade I was told to do a writing (a summary of an English novel of my choice) to get a complete 10 mark, but I didn't the only National Final Exam I can be proud of is my English exam at junior high school since I got a perfect grade I'm not trying to be cocky here though...

Well maybe the cause here, with all my respect, is that the teachers themselves are not very fluent in English. I agree that sometimes we should try to watch English movie without any subtitle (did we do it at our English lab back in high school?). Maybe we should try different approach other than memorizing when to use this and that (maybe using hints?). Or maybe sometimes we invite native speakers to teach, speak, and interact in general (not using some "tarzan" language of course ).

The only thing I don't understand though, we Informatics people live in English environment. All help files are in English. Most Web sites are in English. We like singing English songs. So why could they do such a mistake

[faart]

... And I've just seen this now. MCF brochure? (CMIIW)
Well, yeah, these are indeed common mistakes. I don't know why, a whole lot of my friends actually does these kind of mistakes... Oh, and the college English exam isn't that different. They didn't ask you to really write -- save for answering the questions asked in a reading passage -- and let's face it, they usually just flipped the question to a statement, then add the last part of the answer (Which you can copy exactly from the passage itself).
This is what my elementary school English teacher told us to do, and I think this might be one of the cause... Too much copy and pasting things leads to destruction in studies, right?
Luckily my native teacher told me to write a lot back then, though.

Wow, my National Final Exam is only two points from perfect.  Yeah, Junior High or Senior High, this is what I get. I tend to mess something up. Honestly, I never cared about grammars, it just flows out. Not always right, but well, luckily most of the time it is, although I might make foolish mistakes at times...

I do agree though... We live in English environment, everything is in English. But... One thing I'd like to make a point of : Do not underestimate Google Translate. 

I actually wrote about this in my recent Facebook status.

Are you dare to make something innovative?
Indonesian : Apakah kamu berani untuk membuat sesuatu yang inovatif?

Exactly word to word translation ~ This is Indonesian people.

(@Èxsharaèn : That part about watching movies without any subtitles... I did that a lot in high school. But then again, we went to the same high school  )

(Forgive my mistakes. I've been talking to an American and a Filipino a lot this week >< More like a practice, but yeah... Even people living in America makes mistakes in their grammar. Not that kind of mistake in the first post though, because that's really, really, really obvious.)

[Èxsharaèn]

In real life, however, even natives make mistakes we can only find nearly perfect English in literatures, passages, newspaper (maybe?), but not in everyday's life. Songs are also exceptions; since they are products of art, they tend to mess up the grammar (I intentionally mess up grammars and even flip the proper sentence order in OJ themes ). The only thing we care of in real life is, as long as all of us understand what you mean, it doesn't really matter if you are awful in grammars...

[faart]

Isn't songs more similar to poems in grammar? The writers rarely use a complete sentence.

Answering the first question, it isn't just "not cool" in my opinion, but "unprofessional". ><

[Stash]

So where did you go last night?