John Robert Powers’ grammar error
Pinoys are very critical when it comes to grammatical errors especially with English. Quite funny though because not a lot of pinoys criticize Filipino grammatical errors. Malamang mapagalitan ako ng Filipino teacher ko dahil hanggang ngayon di ko pa rin alam ang kaibahan ng “Nang” at “Ng”.
Case in point: John Robert Powers’ Facebook account had a quiz that they wanted to promote online. The ad showed a rather glaring error as seen below:
John Robert Powers’ “asses” your English photo on their Facebook page
The ad was quickly shared and as of writing, has spread like wildfire and the Facebook post on it and its comments were left unanswered. We contacted John Robert Powers and asked for their official statement. Their Marketing Manager has given us this official statement:
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are from PurpleBug, the digital marketing agency and Facebook administrator of John Robert Powers Manila. We take full responsibility for the spelling error on the English Quiz post. We apologize to JRP for this mistake and for all the negative publicity it has generated.
Points to PurpleBug for taking the responsibility but you could’ve been more stringent and critical about your grammar since your client is providing English lessons to the public. This does not help their credibility.
Meanwhile, someone posts this:
Click on photo to see original post and comments on yahoo answers
And though the comments do state that there are glaring errors, the only comment was the usage of “ito” instead of “siya”. I’m not that good in Filipino pero alam ko na “sya” ay di ni minsan, naging tama. Di rin tama ang “sha” at lalong di tama ang “zha”.
That’s the thing about Pinoys – we’re naturally inclined towards languages. Most of us speak two languages (English and Filipino) often, with another regional language such as Ilocano, Bisaya, Bicolano, Pangasinanse, etc; and yet we choose to be English Grammar demons. We easily forgive those who make glaring errors with Filipino or Tagalog but criticize those who misplace the apostrophe with you’re.
However, this is a school whose campaign “Better English” is heavily promoted with advertising.
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