This week began with a rather scary assignment for Bahasa Indonesia- we took a brief A1 exam before moving into A2 concepts! The exam wasn’t as scary as I was afraid of, but my vocabulary is still lacking in this language. I need to start paying more attention to the roots of words and memorizing them, especially with verbs. Since most of Indonesian verbs begin with ‘mem’, ‘mel’, or ‘ber’, the root is critical for distinguishing different words. For the first several weeks of class I focused more on the start of the word, or tried to memorize the whole word, and have been mixing several words up since! I hope that officially recognizing this fact will help me move forward and improve my ability to distinguish between different, but similar sounding, verbs.
I was a bit worried about the audio portion of the A1 exam, because that is typically the area where I struggle. Fortunately though, Farida spoke the audio portion for us, rather than playing the recording. I found this much easier to understand! Frequently, when hearing Indonesian I have to struggle to remember the words, picture them in my mind, and recall their meeting. While I do this for the beginning of the sentence, the person continues talking and I miss the next words of the sentence and find myself very lost. I just got my grade back while writing this journal entry, and I got a perfect on the listening portion when Farida was speaking!
I also got a perfect on the speaking section My lowest score was for writing, interestingly. Even that wasn’t very low though, and I am excited to move onto A2 level concepts!
After the exam this week, we practiced describing objects from our room. We monologued about each object for 2-3 minutes, describing its shape, color, what it’s used for, where we got it, if we like it, etc. I am beginning to get more comfortable with these speaking sections of class and the words are coming more quickly to me. Unfortunately, I still say a lot of ‘ummm’s in my sentences, but it’s coming along!
On Friday we learned a lot of adjectives about how to describe food. I picked mashed potatoes and described that to Farida, which is my favorite simple food! We also learned some new slang phrases and the comfortable way that young Indonesian people speak or text to each other. Most of these concepts were the same pattern of shortening, so it was fairly understandable!
This week I made a decision to probably not accept a Fulbright grant to Malaysia, even if it should be offered to me. Since I ultimately want to pursue a marine research career, the timing of the grant to Malaysia would mean 2-3 gap years not relevant to my future career before I could begin graduate school. In that light, I questioned why I am still studying Bahasa Indonesia. Luckily, I always wanted to take a new language before I graduated college and I still hope to travel to Indonesia for a few weeks to at least go SCUBA diving! I’m still glad to be learning the language, even though I now don’t think it is relevant to my plans.
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