It is hard to believe that this is my last journal log for the semester (and thus of my college career), but I take some solace in the fact that there is plenty to write in it. I will try to avoid being sentimental until the last few lines of this post, so here are the ordinary updates and the like from the past two weeks.
I always appreciate the small talk that precede my meetings with Melisa because I always learn a lot of interesting and unexpected cultural insights. Prior to our meeting on the 13th of April, I told Melisa that I had just helped out with an interview at the Center for Student Involvement to pick next semester's Manager team. I learned a new way to say "the interview went well" (Temudugua itu berjalan dengan baik), where "went" is berjalan, which also means 'to walk.' Moreover, Melisa wanted to ask me how I was in another way than the typical Apa Khabar, so she asked Kamu sudah makan? ("Have you eaten yet?"). This was interesting because in Chinese there is technically a similar greeting (你吃飯了嗎), though I seldom if ever heard it used. There are plenty of cultural transplants and adaptations from the Chinese diaspora that I find really interesting to discover. We also talked a lot about the education system in Malaysia and how it is broken up into primary (years 1-6) and secondary (years 7-12) school, just as in the British system.
In terms of content, we did a lot of reviewing of adding affixes to nouns, verbs, and adjectives (kata nama, kata kerja, dan adjektif). I like to see how root words can be changed, such as Derma (to donate) becoming Penderma (donor) by adding the -Pen affix that means a doer of that action. Adding the same affix structure to Sapu (to sweep) yields Penyapu, which means a broom. I also was surprised to learn that the prefix -Ter is not just limited to describing superlatives (e.g. baik means 'well' or 'good' and terbaik means 'best'), but also can be used to describe an action that has happened by accident or without advanced planning. For instance, Termakan means 'accidentally eat', which seems a fitting word for me because I have Celiac disease and am always making sure I do not accidentally it gluten. Then there is Terjatuh meaning 'to fall' that is related to the word Menjatuhkan (to defeat someone in something), but not to be used in the same way as Jatuh hati (to fall for someone romantically or to be in love). We also continued to watch the YouTube video on useful phrases in Malay, just to ensure that I knew all of them and was aware of how widely they were used. This is important because apparently much of spoken Malay depends on context, and there are numerous formalities or versions of words that would appear either too formal in casual conversation or too informal in more formal settings. For instance, there is the 'market language' that you can speak where you can simply walk up to an item and ask Berapa ini? (literally 'How much this'), though you.could also ask Berapaka duit/ringit/dolor ('how much money), Berapa banyak ('how much'), or Berapa harga ('how much does it cost'). This is something that I want to consider for when I return to Malaysia (or possibly Singapore) some day and use my language skills there. We also listed to a song that a friend of a friend of Melisa's wrote in Malay about the COVID-19 crisis called "Tenanglah" ('calm down'), which had both a nice message and a lot of new vocabulary to draw upon concerning that could also help me with my upcoming final cultural presentation that I am recording.
As my last blog post on the SDLAP Ning, I want to take this time to extend my appreciation to everyone involved in the program who has made this possible. To this end, I am very much indebted to Dr. Marsh-Soloway and Melisa for there unwavering support and mentorship during all the past two semesters. I have learned so much through studying Malay that I had not expected to learn just a year ago, and I was happy to be able to extend my studies past China and east Asia more broadly and to consider Southeast Asia more seriously. Thanks to the past two semesters, I am now in a position where I know my strengths and weaknesses for self-studying a language, and I can continue to apply the most useful methods for me to my study of not just Malay, but Mandarin as well because I do not want my language skills to deteriorate. Moving forward, my blog posts here and my copious amounts of notes in my Malay folder will help me anchor myself and remember which strategies worked and which did not. One of the byproducts of quarantine is that we have much more time to ourselves (though it sometimes feels like a curse more than a blessing), and keeping up with a language is a great way to pass the time and exercise the brain.
Best wishes to everyone finishing up the semester and planning to continue to enroll in the program, or move on and incorporate these lessons into your own lives!
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