Last week, Julie and I continued to work on my reading/translating skills through articles. Last week, she assigned three articles about the Indonesian food tempeh. For the first article, I read it aloud to her during our meeting and translated it paragraph by paragraph. Even though I generally feel comfortable speaking Bahasa, it was quite a challenge for me to translate each sentence because there were always one or two words I did not know. This made me realize that most of the time, I only get the “big picture” when reading (formal) Indonesian articles and due to the gaps in my vocabulary, I miss some of the finer details. In order to fill those gaps, I have been taking notes on any new words I come across so I can remember them. One thing I noticed was that a lot of the words I did not know were actually formal synonyms of words I already knew. For example, I know that ‘kata’ or ‘bilang’ means ‘say’, though a more formal version I learned through the article is ‘mengatakan’. It is not a word commonly used in conversation, which is why I rarely hear it. I also realized since I am far more used to the informal versions of words, it becomes harder for me to internalize the formal versions, so it is definitely something I want to work harder on. Thus, I appreciate Julie’s approach to introducing new vocabulary words through formal articles because it is an effective way to learn proper vocabulary. She assigned the remaining two articles as homework, so I essentially did the same thing (read it myself and took notes on any new words).
This week, Julie showed me an Indonesian news site called VOA Indonesia that she wants me to use regularly. The site includes videos, daily podcasts, and article on a variety of topics which is a helpful resource to get exposure to the language every day. She emphasized how news sites can especially be helpful to language learning because not only is it relevant to our own lives, but it can become a routine habit and almost a “passive” way to improve reading skills. This is something I am familiar with because I also study Japanese and regularly read news in Japanese for class and practice. We read one article about recycling and another video about an Indonesian student who became a successful software engineer. Similar to last week, I was able to follow and understand the main point of each but missed a few details due to unfamiliar words.
Also, I got to meet Julie for the first time in person this week at UR’s Indonesian cultural fair. As I may have mentioned in a previous entry, Julie was out of town for the first half of September, so our meetings were conducted virtually. However, she returned in time for the fair and we were able to finally meet in person. The fair itself was amazing- in all my time as a student here I had never attended a cultural event solely dedicated to Indonesia. I felt very comfortable there and was able to connect with the local Indonesia community.
Comments
Hi Kianti! I thought it was super cool that you were able to work on your reading/translating skills by translating articles from the target language back to English! I think that was an awesome way to improve comprehension and it was cool learning that UR hosted an Indonesian cultural fair as well!
Hi Kianti! I really enjoyed reading about how you worked on your reading skills through articles. I also did the same with news articles, but I never thought about translating it back into English. I also feel like I don't understand the finer details of articles because of my vocabulary level, so I completely understand how you feel. I also know a lot of the informal words than the formal words, so I hope to work on that too! I also did not know that UR hosted an Indonesian cultural fair, but I'm glad you were able to connect :)