Over the past month, my primary goals have been rebuilding conversational fluency in Indonesian and expanding my active vocabulary, especially the kind of recall that comes under pressure in real conversation. My sessions with Mbak Hesti have continued, and we have leaned heavily into open-ended conversation rather than structured drills or exercises. This was a deliberate choice since my reading, writing, and listening comprehension are all considerably stronger than my speaking because my “recall time” is not the strongest. Pushing myself to respond spontaneously forces me to retrieve vocabulary in real time, which remains my single biggest weak point at this stage.
The good news is that it is working. Our conversations have gotten noticeably more fluid. Words and phrases that I used to stumble over or draw a blank on are starting to come more naturally, and I am finding that the niche vocabulary I learned in 2024 is resurfacing, even when I haven’t used the words themselves for years. I attribute that mostly to getting back into the broader mindset of speaking and thinking in Indonesian. This progress has been genuinely encouraging, even if it is slow since I am know longer in full immersion.
Outside of sessions with Mbak Hesti, I have been doing some independent reading as well. I picked up a copy of "Dua Belas Orang Biasa," a book about the twelve apostles, mostly because it was the only non-instructional Indonesian book I could find in my area. It recounts the stories of the 12 apostles while they followed Christ and then goes into their voyages afterwards, as some of the apostles went on adventures to lands as far away as India and Ethiopia. It does not exactly feel like leisure reading, but engaging with a full-length prose text has been valuable in ways I did not expect. The vocabulary is a little unusual and the sentences are longer than what I encounter in conversation, so it has pushed my reading comprehension in a different direction than our sessions do.
Logistically, this month has had its challenges. The time difference between Virginia and Indonesia makes scheduling difficult. Mbak Hesti is only available from about 7 to 10 PM (and 4am-6am) my time, which overlaps with band practice and other commitments that are hard to move around. Fitting sessions in without canceling something else has required more coordination than I would like. On top of that, she took two weeks off around the end of Ramadan to spend time with her family, which was completely understandable but did create a longer gap in our schedule than I would have preferred.
Going forward, I want to keep the conversational focus but be more intentional about which vocabulary areas I am targeting in each session. Rather than letting conversation roam wherever it naturally goes, I want to try steering toward important topics where my recall is weakest, like my professional areas of interest surrounding economics, policy, and diplomacy. I also want to keep working through the book steadily, since engaging with written Indonesian at that level complements the spoken practice and helps get more vocab terms back in my head.
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