April felt like the month things actually clicked back into place. After a slower March spent mostly rebuilding the vocab for more spontaneous conversation, this month I started feeling something closer to genuine fluency. I am not yet where I want to be, but I have recently felt the kind of fluency where I can sit down with Mbak Hesti, pick a complicated topic, and actually say what I mean without hitting a wall every few sentences.
A big part of that has been the subject matter. We shifted heavily into policy, economics, and the Indonesian education system--more complex topics requring logical thinking, philosophical/hypothetical language, and more advanced vocabulary. Education policy, in particular, is Mbak Hesti's area of expertise because she has a master's degree in Indonesian education, so she can go deep on it in ways that are very interesting for a PPEL student rather than solely useful for the learning the language. We talked at length about the national school lunch program, which has attracted a lot of criticism for its enormous cost relative to the quality of what actually reaches students (there are real questions about where the money is going). We talked about various programs that send college students to teach in rural villages (with mixed success) and the drawbacks of national tests, which introduce a lot of stress into students' lives and often favors those who can better prepare for them/afford tutors/etc.... Having to form and defend an opinion about something like that in Indonesian is a different challenge than talking about daily life or describing past experiences. It requires not just vocabulary but the ability to hedge, qualify, and speculate. That kind of register is one think I had lost after a year away from Indonesia, and working through it in conversation has brought back a lot of advanced vocabulary I had not used since my time in Indonesia.
We also made up most of the sessions we lost around Ramadan, which helped. The longer gap in March had started to show, and getting back to a consistent schedule made a noticeable difference. By mid-April I could feel the sessions building on each other again rather than each one starting from scratch. I can say that my knowledge of Indonesia has also really increased, rather than my language skills alone.
The main deliverables for the class are coming together over the next day or two. Tonight I will be making the podcast conversation with Mbak Hesti to talk about what we worked on, how the process of returning to Indonesian has felt, what has been hard. It will be fun to talk in English for the first time--I don't think I have heard my teacher say more than 3 words in a row in English, since we have really focused on keeping our conversation in Indonesian (though I suspect she is very fluent). The presentation I am making is on Indonesian food, which has been fun to prepare; it turns out that talking about rendang and bakso and regional variation is a nice change of pace from school lunch procurement scandals.
I feel good about where April landed. The gap between what I want to say and what I can actually say in Indonesian has gotten noticeably smaller, and the advanced vocabulary that felt buried earlier in the semester is increasingly accessible. That said, I am not where I want to be. My recall under pressure is still much slower than it would be in English, and there are moments in conversation where I can feel myself reaching for a word or construction and having to settle for something simpler (or times where I forget a super easy word I have not said in a few weeks like percaya=to believe). I will continue classes, with Mbak Hesti and with Mbak Vania, my prof from Boren, over the summer to maintain my level--at the same time I will be starting Turkish in preparation for my Fulbright there next year.
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