Recently, Julie and I have been spending our meeting time reading and translating news articles. Since one of my main goals is to formalize my Indonesian vocabulary, much of our practice consists of studying through articles that use formal language. Something I noticed is how I think I understand the main point of a sentence because I understand the subject, etc. though my lack of understanding of one or two words completely changes the meaning of the sentence. As a result, I have been keeping a list of commonly used words in formal news articles. I like how Julie includes a variety of topics to read about which have included music, the Thomas Cup, Indonesian-Australian politics, and more.
In addition to articles, Julie also had me write an essay on an Indonesian artist, which was one of the bigger writing assignments. She chose the topic of Indonesian artists due to the fact that she had plans to travel to Amsterdam to visit her brother who is in charge of an Indonesian exhibit at an art museum. Coincidentally, I had actually gone to the VMFA the week before for another class, so the topic worked out very well. I chose to write about Raden Saleh because some of his paintings allude to historical events which I thought would be interesting to research and incorporate in my essay.
While writing the essay, I found the process to be more difficult than I thought. Julie had given me a few links as reference in order to conduct research on Raden Saleh. All of the websites were in Bahasa Indonesia, so even though I could read and understand them, I still had to write my own composition and it was hard to paraphrase from the sources because they were all historical facts. To avoid plagiarizing, I had to summarize the facts in my own words and a big part of that was looking up synonyms. It was very helpful, however, because I learned a lot of new vocabulary in the process. Finding appropriate synonyms was tricky because sometimes some words are only used in certain contexts, so I had to look up example sentences. Another difficult part was making the essay flow nicely with the use of transition words. I felt like I kept repeating certain transition words such as setelah (after) and karena (because). I also felt that I used the word dan (and) a lot and wanted to know if there was another word I could use to connect two nouns or clauses. Julie sent my essay back with corrections and there were fewer mistakes than I thought. One mistake was my use of informal language in the essay. I used the informal word bilang (say), which is only used in spoken Bahasa, instead of berpendapat. Another mistake was my incorrect use of prefixes. When discussing this, Julie remembered me saying that I wanted to work on them at the beginning of the semester, so our next big topic will be lessons and practice with prefixes and suffixes.
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