Indonesian Diary Entry

8/23    This is the end of a second week of language instruction. 

Tomorrow is a real day but we are going to an ancient Buddhist Temple with one of our language instructors (Pak Tri, although I suspect he’ll never see this) as a field trip.  I am sure I will write about it subsequently (as well as any other travel I expect to do this weekend) so I won’t go into it now.

Language instruction.  This has been an interesting and frustrating experience.  It seems like learning manual skills following a stroke.  Fortunately, I do not speak from experience or even first hand knowledge, but it seems like a good analogy.  Indeed, analogy strikes a resonant chord.  Let me lead with the problems and concerns and then follow with positive comments. 

The main problem with trying to learn Bhasa Indonesia is that it is totally unfamiliar.  We hear bits of Spanish (and romance other languages) regularly.  The songs we listen to, the novels we read, even the daily newspaper, all have sprinklings of such languages.  This gives us a little bit of the sense of the cadence of the languages, not to mention some of the vocabulary.  Bhasa Indonesia does not get much airplay in Worcester or Boston.  The language (BI) is not complicated.  Indeed, structurally and grammatically it is very simple.  But it is a foreign language to these ears.  So a new word takes a long time to become familiar, and for me familiarity is a prerequisite to memorization.  I am attending class with someone who has a bit more of the language coming into the class, so I am regularly trailing him.  This does not inspire confidence.  Initially I felt that learning BI in the normal order and according to our book was inappropriate for me.  After all, I really am not going to be using colors very much, and I don’t really care about the correct words for household items.  But I’m feeling better about mastering the mundane.  Part of it is that I do occasionally find that knowing the right word for window or cupboard is handy, but more than that such words start me with some vocabulary.  There are now some words to bounce around in my head, and to make me feel like I know something of the language.  They are building blocks for concepts.

Another problem that I will mention and then pass on is that it has been quite a while since I learned anything like a language.  I recall Bill Fisher at Clark remarking that he enjoys learning languages.  It is a recreation for Bill.  It is not for me and never has been.

There is no reason to carry on about the problems of learning BI.  They are what they are.  (If anyone wants to hear me/read from me about more on this, I am certainly happy to rant further.)  My assessment right now is that I am where I should have been at the end of the first week, not the second.

Now the positive side.  Each day has me feeling that I know more than I did the previous day.  There are some signs that I really am learning.  I can make myself understood to taxi drivers, if I go into a store (a total misnomer for most of my Indonesian experience) with an idea of what I want to purchase, I can accomplish it.  Admittedly I use my hands and even other parts of my body more than I’d like, but I get the message across when it is necessary.  I am sitting at a desk with a bunch of things on it and I can say the names of many of the things and that they are on the desk.  Perhaps if I keep the work up, and don’t wallow in self-pity I will continue to progress.  One thing of interest is that I actually do enjoy working on the language.  We have homework every evening and I work at it assiduously, if not always efficiently or successfully.  Perhaps the problem is not how far I’ve come, but the yardstick against which I’m measuring myself.  (I begin and end the same way:  this time with a metaphor.  Indonesians do not use yardsticks.  They use the metric system!)

Now an observation on foreigners in foreign lands.  Why is it that we always want to explain ourselves when abroad?  Today was a bit of a fun day.  After class my fellow student and I were invited to do a videotaping for the language school (Puri).  The idea was for our interviewers to ask us some ordinary questions about life in the U.S., which would provide some cultural context to their students studying English, as well as an opportunity for the students to hear native speakers.  We were asked a variety of questions about life in the U.S., most of which were intended to be comparative to life in Indonesia.  I would say that it went well enough, but was a little embarrassed to find myself (ourselves) talking about the U.S. in a way that professed knowledge far beyond what either of us could really claim.  We were treated like visiting experts and fell into the trap.  It is good for the students who will view the tape, but somewhat unsettling.  In any case, the future viewers (another class of people who will not ever view this diary) will now know a bit more about what people in New England do during the winter, with its short and frigid days, why people in the U.S. do not gather in their neighborhoods to celebrate our national day by doing special projects, and a bit about how we view our government and ourselves.  As I think about it, I really do wish they could read this diary as a companion to the tape.  It would give a better picture of the speaker than the video image they watched.