In Bahasa Indonesia, there are certain sounds that are associated with meaning parts of speech. For example, the suffix ‘an’ can be added to the end of a verb to make it a noun, such as how ‘to eat’ or ‘makan’ can be made into food, or ‘makanan.’ I have noticed, and greatly appreciate, that Indonesian follows Subject – Verb – Object syntax similar to English. The biggest difference is that adjectives and possessives must come after the object they are describing, not before as in English. Fortunately, my previous study of Italian and other Latin languages has made me more accustomed to this syntax, and now I find it almost strange that English describes the object before saying the object. Mentally, it seems much more effective to first conjure the general object and then add clarifies to adjust the understanding of the nature of the object.
Similarly to German (which I only know a small bit of), Indonesian semantics largely comes from smaller words with meaning. For example, the word hospital is ‘rumah kasit’, meaning ‘sick house’. The word for today is ‘hari ini’ or this day. I find this understanding of the language to be super helpful for memorizing words. Frequently, breaking down a vocabulary term like that facilitates my understanding of the word and when to use it, as well as storing the term in my long-term memory. I frequently study languages in this way, by breaking each phrase and word down into its smaller components and understanding the larger meaning from that. However, this trick is not always useful. In some scenarios, the entire phrase is important for the meaning and the words don’t seem to make sense. For example, in Italian there is a phrase ‘In boca al lupo” which means good luck, but quite literally, ‘into the wolf’s mouth.’ It took me a long time for me to understand this common saying because individually, the words seem to make no sense. However, the actual semantics, or meaning, of the phrase only appears when those words are combined together and with the cultural background of Italy’s superstition against directly wishing someone good luck and ‘jinxing’ it. This idiom is very similar to the English ‘break a leg.’ So far, I have yet to find something similar in Indonesian. However, I think that with my daily sessions with Farida focusing more on using the language now, some similar phrase in Indonesian will eventually appear that has no meaning estranged from its cultural settings. With these types of sentences, it is necessary to look at the entire phrase as well as the cultural setting in order to understand its meaning.
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