Learning Bahasa Indonesia: Month #1

It is now past the one-month mark of my time here in Indonesia and much has happened. I was invited to a celebration of Edul-Adha with my co-teacher’s family, I’ve spent over 15 hours teaching young students that I can tell are gaining a fascination both with my presence and the concept of speaking English, which I can now tell is maybe one of the biggest benefits the ETA program provides. I have also not been unproductive when it comes to language acquisition. With my tiny, yellow notebook in hand, I’ve spent time every day writing down new vocabulary that is offered to me by the patient Indonesians in my life. As the pages fill up, I can feel a sense of accomplishment. So, at this stage of the language learning process, I wanted to document some of my thoughts and observations as I take on this brand new language.

Here are some examples of interesting features of this language that I have noticed:

1. A Different Language Family: Indonesian is frequently touted for its simplistic sentence and writing structure when it comes to Asian languages. However, Indonesian is still a Level 3 (out of 5) language difficulty for Native English Speakers according to the Foreign Service Institute, under other Asian and Slavic languages, but above most European languages. The reason for this higher difficulty rating is because there is little linguistic crossover, as much of European languages stem in some fashion from a Latin base. However, despite these drastic differences, Indonesian still maintains a simple S+V+O structure and does not have any verb conjugations, cases, pronouns or genders!

2. Word Simplicity: Bahasa Indonesia is taken from Bahasa Melayu and as the influential lingua franca for the Malacca Sultanate (major international port for SEA) in the 15th century, it took on interesting developments, resulting in simplifying features such as the duplicative plurality (buku-buku=books) and the lack of a gender. As a result of this, the language can benefit from a direct meaning translation as opposed to a more complicated language such as English, which finds its root words buried under sediment of Latin, Germanic, etc. influence. Indonesian in some ways almost feels like a constructed language, just because of how logical many names for objects are. Here are some examples of very literal translations that can be funny and sometimes shockingly poetic.

3. Friendly/Formal/Written versions: Just like it’s currency, Indonesia’s language has also undergone pretty radical changes over the last 40 years. The Indonesian dictionary has been reprinted 4 times, and pronunciation/spelling has also been affected by colonialist rule over time. In addition, there is a bigger divide in language used for formal writing and language used for informal speaking than in English. One example of this is the word for if. In spoken terms it is Kalau. However, Jika and Bila are the versions more frequently seen in texts and street signs. In addition, transition words have a very different practical use between written and spoken form. In written form you will see a greater variety of transition words such as Pertama/Kedua/Ketiga (First, Second, Third), Selainjutnya (Next), Lalu (Then), etc. However, in spoken form the method of transition can be boiled down to one word: Terus.

4. Code Switching: Across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands, there are roughly 800 unique local languages that are spoken by different communities. So of course, that means that local phrases sneak their way into Indonesian, and even conversations beginning in Bahasa Indonesia can naturally develop into the local language. For my site, that local language is Bahasa Jawa, or Javanese. I am beginning to be able to tell when this transition begins. Phrases like Nggak Iso/Usa (You can’t/You don’t need to) are very typical Javanese phrases transplanted into even formal conversation as well as Nggeh/Boten (Yes/No). The prevalence of Javanese within daily conversation means that if I want to gain comfortable fluency in my site, I will need to become conversational in both Indonesian and Javanese.

This is definitely not a comprehensive list of all of the fascinating things that I will come to know about this language. I also have Javanese to look forward to learning about as well as Madurese. I think a paradise for me is living in a place where the comfortable norm is communicating in two, three different languages and I can already see that Gondanglegi will be such an interesting breeding ground for linguistic phenomena. I am excited to see how these ideas evolve and how my own language ability continues to improve. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you have found my commentary interesting.

A big hug from the southeast corner of the world! 😊