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I followed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. The course itself was great, but halfway through I realized he had to be from Malaysia or Singapore,

• evincarofautumn 12y ago
  Yeah, besides word choice (“I have a doubt” = “I have a question” in Indian English) you also have more interesting things like discourse deixis—“consider that code: …” instead of “consider this code: …”—or how uncertainty is expressed—“some” instead of “a” for example shows up in Daft Punk’s “Something About Us”.
  • the_af 12y ago
    Interesting! "I have a doubt" is also a common mistake for us Spanish speakers. This is because for us "tengo una duda" is an acceptable way of saying "I have a question".
    • hibbelig 12y ago
      German here. It felt _really_ weird when my American boss asked me whether I have a doubt. Yes, most people in his team are from India.
• jpatokal 12y ago
  As a former (non-native) resident of Singapore, that's one of those features of the local lingo that makes me shudder every time I see it, but it's probably already crossed the line from "mistake" to "accepted local evolution". It certainly is well entrenched, as I've seen it in bank letters about choosing good passwords, and it's in this university policy as well: Have both upper and lower case alphabets http://iits.smu.edu.sg/cyber-security/password-management http://iits.smu.edu.sg/cyber-security/password-management Quite a few other telltale Singlish features in there as well, eg. the use of "staff" to refer to a single employee and using "credential" instead of "credentials". Both of these are rooted in how Chinese and Malay lack a grammatical plural.