This is my last language learning journal! I can’t believe this semester is over already, and yet it also seems like it’s been so long! My last two weeks of learning Bahasa Indonesia went by so very fast, too. We spent a lot of time reviewing material we had covered previously, which was quite necessary. We covered a lot very quickly and not all of it stuck entirely in my head. Although I had memorized the basic phrases, there were still many things that don’t come to me quickly. We reviewed the words for extended families again and described our family members using the adjectives that we have learned since. I was able to say that my grandmother talks a lot: nanek aku berbicara banyak. We also learned some new slang phrases, like when somebody puts sih at the end of a phrase to indicate their annoyance. I thought this was a particularly interesting concept, since the culture of Indonesia seems to be a bit more restrained and it’s more polite to not express emotions. At first it seemed a bit strange to me that they have a word solely to express their annoyed sentiments in a sentence. But then I realized this could be one of two things: it’s a slang phrase so it’s likely that only younger people use it and it’s considered a bit less formal, and therefore more acceptable to express annoyance in situations where slang phrases are used. I also wondered if this word was developed to convey annoyance without making the entire sentence sound angry and pissed off, since that might be more impolite than conveying the same meaning with one word. I thought it was very interesting to try to understand this word within the cultural context, and realized just how much I’ve learned about Indonesian language and culture throughout this semester! After our Indonesian class ended, I had one final project left- to interview an Indonesian person! Farida gave me the contact of one of her friends and I reached out to her, and we set up an interview time in Indonesian. Although I first read her email response and thought “oh no I don’t understand any of this”, after a second and third read I was able to grasp the general meaning and only had to translate a few words to understand everything! My progressed understanding of root words in Indonesian and how they are manipulated to form new words really helped me, more than I realized at the time! When we had the interview, it went better than I hoped! I asked her about activities to do outside in Indonesia like hiking or swimming, and we talked about it for a good while. I wasn’t able to understand every word that she said, but I was able to gather the meaning most of the time! It was very gratifying to be able to successfully talk to a stranger and native speaker in Indonesian, although I was super nervous to start out. I hope that I am able to continue using and practicing the language and eventually go to Indonesia to truly apply it!
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I really liked reading your journal entry and I'm so glad your Indonesian is improving! I think it's so cool how you realized your reading skills were more advanced than you originally thought. I think if you keep going in this same vein, you'll see really good results for your language learning soon!
That is such an interesting element of the language, thanks for sharing Maddie! In my linguistics classes we talk a lot about the nature of slang to a language and I often consider it just as or sometimes more valid than grammar rules that can be found in a dictionary, and I think they're a great way to see how the people have added a bit of their own flair to the language over time as their needs changed. I wonder how this annoyance suffix would look if we added it to English!