These past two weeks have been a lot of language learning, which is always fun! We learned about the rooms in a house, such as ruang tamu (living room), dapur (kitchen), and kamar tidur (bedroom). Casey and I practiced describing our ideal houses to each other and drawing what the other described, which was fun!
We also learned more about describing people and what they wear. Farida taught us more clothing words like dasi (tie) and syal (scarf), and many words to describe somebody’s appearance. She explained about the cultural nuances of describing appearance as well. For example, it is perfectly acceptable and not racist to say that somebody’s skin is putih (white), hitam (black), kuning (yellow), kemerah-merahan (reddish), or coklat (brown). A badan (body) can be tinggi (tall) or kecil (small), but hair is Panjang (long) or pendek (short). Some cultures can be very sensitive to the way appearances are described, and some descriptions may be very offensive, so I was glad to learn the appropriate words from Farida!
These weeks also covered a lot of kata sifat, or adjectives, which I was glad to learn more of. Many of them were to describe a person’s or house’s appearance, but we also learned many more such as imut (cute), malah (expensive), and jauh (far). Casey and I practiced these over zoom by thinking of a sentence for each adjective and saying it out loud. If I were faster, I could also practice my listening when Casey spoke, but I am usually looking at my next word and trying to think of a sentence using it while Casey speaks.
We also started getting a bit more into the more complex grammar of Indonesian, an exciting aspect for me. This whole time I’ve been rather confused as to how Indonesian doesn’t have a past tense for its verbs, but I’m starting to understand how the same temporal ideas are conveyed through additional words. For example, sedang, when put in front of a verb, conveys the meaning of being in the process. An example of this is Apa yang sedang kamu lakukan, which means ‘what are you doing now?’. Alternatively, adding sudah before a verb carries the meaning of something just having happened, such as in the case of Kita sudah makan malam, (we just ate dinner). Combining this with my new grasp of words like biasanya (usually) and kadang-kadang (sometimes), I find myself much more able to express temporal nuances in my speaking and writing.
Finally, we submitted our monthly assignment for Farida. I wrote about a time that I went rock climbing with my friends a few weeks ago, and I was surprised at how much I was able to write in Indonesian to describe everything I did that day. I still had to look up some specific words like obat (medicine) and medaki (climb), but I was still able to express most of my ideas without help from my notes! It’s very exciting to see myself progressing in the language.
Replies
That’s insane that you’re able to write all of that given that you just started to learn this language this semester! Major props to you and your language instructor. That’s really interesting that for certain lexical terms don’t have certain tenses. I guess that makes things simpler when learning a language, but complicated at the same time? Hopefully that makes sense, but I’m happy to hear that you got it down!
It's been fun learning Indonesian with you! I also enjoyed the house drawing activity.
Madelyn,
I think your exercise where you describe your ideal house and drawing the other's dream house is so amazing. That is so creative and engages multiple different parts of the brain to solidify the knowledge you learn. I am extremely impressed with how your langue journey is going thus far. Keep up the good work!