While Fall Break meant that I missed some of my one-on-one meetings with my language partner, I worked on and learned some interesting topics nonetheless. One thing I am happy to say that I've made progress in is writing - I have been able to write short yet cohesive paragraphs and dialogues for homework, which has allowed me to piece together disparate aspects of my language learning thus far and strengthen my linguistic foundation and understanding of Malay. To this end, learning how to denote tense/condition of verbs has been incredibly beneficial. Rather than having to conjugate it as in other languages, verb tense can be implied through adverbial indicators and context. This has not been too difficult for me to grasp, likely because of the fact that Chinese has the same characteristic and sentence structure (S-V-O). The word "telah" means "already" and indicates past tense, whereas the word "akan" means "will" and indicates future tense; simply affixing these in front of a verb will denote tense, however other indicators (i.e. time) should be included to make sense of the sentence. There is also the prefixes "me" and "mem" that can be affixed to the front of verbs to indicate present tense and what is happening now rather than a declarative statement. Melissa has been very helpful with explaining to me some of the ways in which Malay does or does not reflect English grammar, which makes forming new sentences and retaining this information much easier for me.
It was particularly interesting to learn how Malay describes seasons. The word "musim" means season and is, like Chinese, attached to each of the words for the specific season (unlike the one-word "spring" or "summer" in English). The descriptor for the season comes, as adjectives do in Malay, after the "musim" noun. The word for fall/autumn is "musim luruh" ("luruh" meaning "shed," as in trees shedding their leaves), winter is ""musim sejuk" ("sejuk" meaning "cold"), spring is "Musim burga" ("burga" meaning "flower"), and summer is "musim pasas" ("pasas" meaning "hot"). The conceptualization behind the descriptors for these seasons is fascinating because it mirrors many of American culture's own associations (e.g. flowers blooming with spring), yet goes the extra step of incorporating them into the official name. This topic came up as I described what I did for fall break ("cuti" meaning holiday would be added to "musim luruh" meaning fall to create "cuti musim luruh").
I am now in the process of learning to describe what I did in the past and will do in the future in terms of school (e.g. attended a class in the International Center yesterday), which will help Melissa and I to have real conversations describing my routine each time we meet that will not sound rehearsed or scripted and aid with commanding a more natural grip of the language for me. As I have noted in many of my previous posts, pronunciation remains an important milestone for me, and I will continue to incorporate what I have learned about the International Phonetic Alphabet and sounds in Bahasa Melayu into my study of the language.
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