Indonesian 30-Day Language Challenge: Day 5

Video number 5 is here! This went over ten minutes in length because I tried talking a bit about my recently-confirmed grand jury duty situation before switching to the main topic of the day: my language learning routine.

(By the way, the full archive of videos can be found here.)

The transcription alone is going to take a lot more time for this one, so I’ll be keeping the commentary to a minimum:

Hi everyone, how’s it going? I’m back again with a new video, the fifth video in this month, the month of my Indonesian language challenge.

Opening lines picked up from watching more Indonesian Youtubers — balik lagi is “back again”

First of all for today, I have an important announcement — I was just selected to be a juror in the borough (region? area?) of Queens today, this morning. Early this morning I got up and instead of going to work, I went to the courthouse to… to be selected to be a juror. And this isn’t a regular jury, this is a “big jury”, or what’s called a “grand jury” in English. For this jury, I will have to go to the courthouse every day, from today until the 29th of December, almost the whole month. And… this is my duty as an American citizen, and so, I was selected and have to perform this duty this month as well. That means I’ll actually have two challenges this month: the first challenge is to study Indonesian and record a video every day, and the second challenge is to go to the courthouse every day and discuss various cases in the grand jury room. And… the grand jury is actually very different from a regular jury. With a regular jury happens in a place where it can be seen by everyone, publicly, but a grand jury only… it’s private. Everything that happens in a grand jury is secret, and it’s forbidden to discuss the case outside of the room. I also can’t say more about the details of the case I already discussed today, and about the other cases I’ll be discussing with the other jurors in the future, for this whole month.

“Public”=publik, “private”=pribadi.

Ok, all of that was an announcement, but the main topic for today isn’t actually the grand jury, but how I study languages. According to our schedule we’re supposed to talk a bit about this. And I’ll talk not only about how I study Indonesian, but also about how I study all the languages I’ve already studied.

And actually, the way I study languages is very simple — I get books from the internet and read them, and read more books, and read and read and read until I can talk with people in real life.

The idiomatic way to say “real life” is apparently kehidupan nyata, not hidup asli which I made up on the fly.

And besides that… well, when do I find time to read those books? I read them when I go to work and on my way back. And for that reason, I’m actually glad that this month I have to go to the courthouse instead of to work, because my trip from home to court is longer than my trip to work, and I have more time to read books.

I feel like my intonation/phrasing didn’t make it clear that I was asking a question with “when do I find time to read those books?” Need to work on that.

For example, today, I just finished a book that I already showed you, called Bagus Sekali. (shows it again) I’ve already finished this book. And from today, I’ll start reading this book, called Keren. And this book was published not here, but in Australia, because in Australia there are lots of people who really want to… and wish to… and… want to learn Indonesian, because Indonesia is the biggest neighbor… yeah, the biggest neighbor because the rest, all of Australia’s other neighbors are little islands. And… only Indonesia is a big country and a neighbor of Australia. That’s why there’s lots of people there who want to learn Indonesian, and that’s why a lot of textbooks are published in Australia for Indonesian as well.

This segment on Australia and Indonesia was a bit rambling since I hadn’t organized my thoughts on this beforehand.

And besides that, besides reading books, I also go to events that take place here in New York City, because New York is a big city, and has lots of people that come here from all over the world, from all countries. And for that reason there are a lot of possibilities for language exchange — a lot of people want to learn new languages, and a lot of people can teach them too. And for this reason, there are lots of [language exchange] events, like… there’s one event called Mundo Lingo that takes place on Tuesdays, and there’s another event that happens on Sunday, called… simply… New York City Language Exchange. And at all these sorts of events there are lots of people from lots of countries, and especially for me, there are lots of opportunities to… PRACTICE… I forgot this word, I should know it, but I forgot… And that’s it, I read a lot of books, and I go to events to speak with people who speak these languages to improve my knowledge in various language.

“To practice” is berlatih, melatih, etc.

Also, what I said in the video was an oversimplification — I completely forgot to mention all the the other content (especially listening material) that I consume while studying a language.

I also completely forgot to mention another language event I’ve been going to recently — Barden Linguistics Language Exchange. Barden is a French-American start-up that is about to release a new language exchange app, and in the run up to their release they’ve been organizing weekly language exchange events in several cities including NYC. These events tend to be a bit smaller and focus on just a few languages — Spanish and French, for example — which has it’s benefits as well. (Yeah, I’m not sure I’d have been able to explain that all in Indonesian, which might be why it slipped my mind. 😅)

Wow, this video is already more than ten minutes long, and I have to stop here because the application I’m using can’t record videos longer than fifteen minutes, and so I have to stop. Now. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow. Bye.

I wanted to say “right now” but couldn’t think of the right word. Sekarang juga would have worked.