Language the Stumbling Block !

 I have been watching Sirasa Lakshapathi seasons, off and on for some years now.

Something I have noticed was that majority of the participants was well prepared when it comes to knowledge within our shores.

Be its local history, literature, traditions etc, they were well versed.

But throw something beyond our shores at them and the majority of them were very shaky. 

Sometimes, some have managed to come up with the correct answer but they were not based on solid knowledge but merely guessing it.  

Last week, a very young schoolgirl appeared on the show and she has taken the attention of the country by her mastery of many subjects and charm but as I said, it was sad to see how she fumbled at the question involving Adolf Hitler’s life.

She was trying to arrive at the correct answer by intelligently deducting unlikely possibilities out but in real life matters sometimes this method does not work right.

I see one possible reason as to why many fail at this stumbling block.

That is the language barrier.

There are not enough materials available in the local language for them to go through and the very few materials only appear in newspapers and journals but they are of not much substance either.

Either their sources are not so credible and or most get badly mutated due to poor translations.

Can you remember the story where someone recently reported finding “Building Blocks on Mars” as finding Bricks on Mars?

One way to encourage aspirants to seek beyond our shores is to Quizmaster to include at least 30% of the questions from beyond our shores. 

Sadly, I have seen even the Quizmaster was making some very technical mistakes too.

Like the questions, “Is Australia an island or a continent?” or mispronouncing some of the well-known sport personals names were some of the recent ones.

Sadly, there is no way available to report such mistakes to the Quizmaster and the purpose of reporting such occurrences is to reduce and or eliminate such mistakes in future and it would be good for the credibility of the program in the end.