During the first two weeks of the semester, I got to meet Farida, the language partner for Bahasa Indonesia. We utilize a hybrid structure, with 1-hour online sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a 1-hour in-person session on Wednesdays, and an asynchronous portion on Fridays. I think it is a nice balance to maximize learning opportunities.
Even though I am Indonesian, I was born and raised in the US and do not know a lot of other Indonesian people outside of my family, so it is nice to be able to communicate with Farida. She knows it is my heritage language, so she tries to speak in Bahasa as much as possible, as I am already familiar with basic grammar and vocabulary. I still find myself mixing in English when I speak in Indonesian, so I want to work on producing purely Indonesian sentences. Essentially, there are a lot of gaps in my knowledge of Indonesian language, so I hope to fill those gaps and develop my speaking, listening, reading, and writing abilities.
With Indonesian being my heritage language, I mainly spoke it as a child, so it did not fully develop, especially when I started going to school. I noticed that were many things I did not know or realize about the language, one being the differences between formal and informal speaking. This was evident on our lessons about pronouns- I knew all the informal ones but I had never heard of the formal versions. When I speak Indonesian around my family, I mostly use informal, so it was difficult for me to distinguish between the two. As a result, I somewhat internalized Indonesian to be a mainly “informal” language, but I now know that this is not the case. It was further emphasized in another lesson about honorifics.
For our lecture and speaking classes, I started learning about greetings, pronouns, and introductions (self and other people). As I mentioned above, the hardest part about the lessons were learning about the formal versions. I had never heard of most of the formal words before, so I had to take extra steps to remember the distinctions. I appreciate the structure of the class, as it mixes several language skills such as speaking and writing. For example, Farida might lecture for a few minutes about the topic and introduce key points, but then she will have me create sentences by speaking or by writing in the chat or a Google doc. This was especially helpful when learning about pronouns because I had to use each different pronoun but also switch the subject/object around. Our language table and asynchronous portions focus more on cultural lessons about Indonesia. Our lessons have included public spaces in Indonesia and transportation. I find these lessons helpful to learn about life in Indonesia as well as its history. Since I have visited Indonesia several times, I am also able to contribute my previous knowledge and expand on it. These lessons have included the usage of videos, then comprehension questions afterwards to assess my understanding or clarify the content. For the asynchronous class, I have a journal assignment afterwards which I find helpful to practice my writing skills. During every class session, I write any new vocabulary or grammar points that come up.
Comments