Bahasa Indonesia

When I was a Freshman in college, I had this grand plan that I would become fluent in 12 languages, and had them all charted out (Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, Italian, German, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, and Swahili, in addition to the English, French, and Spanish that I already spoke). So I jumped head first into Japanese during my first quarter at UCLA and pretty quickly sunk to the bottom. Somehow, the grand plan had been derailed.

Later I would study Portuguese and end up doing quite well with it, but efforts to learn Russian at Cal Extension and Turkish in Turkey didn’t yield such positive results, and I think part of me gave up. Maybe most of me.

And then came Indonesia. I had been told that Bahasa Indonesia was one of the world’s easiest languages. Not tonal, no verb conjugation, no tenses, and perhaps most importantly, it uses the Roman alphabet. And while I never planned to master the language, my performance here could be described as nothing short of pathetic. Or maybe it’s precisely short of pathetic, not even meriting that distinction.

I’ve been in this part of the world for nearly six weeks (I say “this part of the world” instead of Indonesia because I was in East Timor for a week), and all I have to show linguistically for my time here is about a hundred words, and perhaps the semi-mastery of 20 phrases. And of those, I think that I’ve picked up about half of them in this last week alone, meaning that I advanced from horrible to terrible, and I’ll likely end up just about there.

This performance might be understandable if the English level of the average Indonesian were high, but it’s absolutely not (and this should not be taken as any critique of their language skills since just about everyone I met was at least bilingual and often trilingual). While there have been a few places where one could get by with English, that’s been the exception. I can speak to people in English, but I really think that it’s my hand gestures and their grunts that are doing a lot more than any standard comprehension of language. This performance might also be understandable if I had been with translators the whole time, but that’s also not been the case. I could make up many reasons about why I did so poorly, but I think that the fact is that I’ve just been lazy. After all, I learned to say “good morning”, “good day”, “good afternoon”, but not “good evening/good night”. You’d think that I could have at least followed through on that one.

And it’s too bad since Bahasa Indonesia has some interesting elements to it, and has some phrases that sound nice and that are fun to say. I’m going to butcher the spelling, but here are a few examples: Terima kasih (thank you), said in a very sing-songy way, is followed by sama, sama (you’re welcome, or same same), selamat siya (good day) is followed simply by siya (which sounds like see ya most of the time, but sometimes has a more nasal “siyang” sound so I might have been saying it wrong all along), and sampai jumpa lagi (see you later) is just a great sounding sentence that I want to say over and over again. Pluralizing is done, as I understand it, by repeating the word, so “orang” is a person, and “orang orang” are people. But perhaps the most used words, and certainly the most important are “bloom” and “sudah”. The first one means “not yet” and the second “already”, but they’re really much more than this because they are the way that tenses are described. So someone might say the equivalent of “you eating already?” or “you paying for the room not yet?” Actually makes the language quite easy…that is, for anyone who invests even a tiny bit of energy in learning it. I was not that person here.

I am studying Hindi with my girlfriend this year and my experience in Indonesia should really make me think long and hard about whether I’m capable of learning another language. Actually, I know that I’m capable. The only question is whether I’m willing to invest the energy to do it right. It would be good to get to the bottom of that now so as to not waste any more of her and my time since she’s serious about it, and she’s good. Must be that she’s seven years my junior and young people learn languages far more easily than us old folks. Or at least that’s the excuse for today.