After finishing my pronunciation exercise, I decided to listen to some Indonesian speakers and see how closely I could follow along. Thalia showed us a video from a video blogger a while ago that I thought would be perfect for me to use. The woman is from the United States, but she is currently living in Indonesia with her husband and son. The videos were helpful because the woman used both languages when speaking. She would say easy words in Indonesian and more difficult ones in English. I watched a few videos and just tried to focus on translating as she spoke. I found it extremely difficult at first, but I started to get the hang of it after a while. I started to realize her cadence and sentence structure. I then watched one of her more recent videos. In this video, she almost exclusively spoke in Indonesian. She was discussing the different prices that warungs, local stores, charge different people. Having knowledge of the most common food in the warungs, I was able to follow along very well.
This exercise showed me that learning how to listen and translate at the same time is the most difficult task for me to accomplish. The best thing I can do is try to learn as much vocabulary as possible. Accomplishing just this helps because I can at least follow along and fill in what I do not know with context clues.
Comments
Hey Bo, I'm glad your brought this up because listening to others speak Indonesian was also very difficult for me as well. It is nice to know that we both had a somewhat tough time getting the hang of it. Personally, the speaking aspect has been a little easier but hearing others, especially more advanced and native speakers, has proved to be a little more challenging. I do agree with you, however, that knowing the words beforehand helps understand the conversation better.
It is good to know that we booth had similar troubles!