I think I'm learning Indonesian, I really think so

September 23, 2010

            Three times a week Laura and I go to the Language Training Center on the sixth floor of the library at Satya Wacana University (where I teach) for our two hour language lesson from Ibu Frances, the Center’s director and a Fulbright fellow herself, having spent a year at Columbia University teaching Indonesian. She’s young, in her late 20s I would guess, perhaps early 30s, funny, vibrant and very smart, and she’s a hard driver, a great teacher quick with praise and careful in her corrections. We have a little workbook we are supposed to go through, and we do, learning how to talk about time and jobs and so forth, but she also follows us where we want to go and spins off on little linguistic discourses of her own. She is from Makassar, a city on the southern tip of the island of Sulawesi, and one of her largest pet peeves about the Indonesian language is the degree to which it is “Java-centric,” pulling in as standard rules that are created and used on Java, where most of the population lives: bits drawn from the Javanese language (the 8^th largest language group in the world with over 100 million speakers) and culture that the rest of Indonesia has to suck up and accept. (One gets the sense that outside of Java this is a common pet peeve about everything Indonesian.) The Center’s facilities are new and extremely modern and comfortable, and the view from the top is magnificent, looking over the volcanoes and the lush greenery all over the city of Salatiga: the palm trees and banana trees and gardens and hills, the red tile roofs. And we’re making progress, slowly, but I can go into the world speaking a language I knew nearly nothing about just one month ago, and there is something enormously satisfying about having that sudden experience.

            On one level, the Indonesian language provides immediate accessibility in ways I’m not familiar with in other languages I’ve learned (or tried to learn). For one thing, there are no tenses to hassle with. “To be” verbs, the perennial difficulty in many languages, are almost non-existent, there only on occasion and then appearing in only a couple of forms. And pronouns don’t change, for the most part, regardless of whether they are object or subject or possessive: Saya (I) is always saya, even when it’s me or mine.  If it’s clear in context, plurals aren’t needed, and if it isn’t, you just reduplicate (linguistic talk for repeat) the word: anak (child) becomes anak-anak (children), which does lead to a certain degree of cumbersomeness when you’re talking about, say, more than one universitas.

I’m nowhere near competent; I don’t think I’ve even risen to the level of incompetent just yet, but I can go out in public and find the things I need, provided I study four or five words that I’ll know I’ll need before I go out. I’m getting better at hearing numbers – usually now I only have to ask one or two times for them to be repeated, and I don’t have to have them written down anymore. The ‘e’ sound still reduces many of my students to polite but insuppressible giggles when I try to make it in my classes, but I’ve even managed the rolling ‘r,’ though when I hear it I often hear ‘l’ instead, and then mispronounce again. I’m not feeling overwhelmed by the slightest transaction, even though I am a little bored with the conversation pieces I’ve managed to acquire, telling where I’m from, how long I’ve been here and how long I’ll be here, about my family, about where I teach, about how basic my Indonesian language skills are, about how I like the Indonesian people who are nice and friendly and the country is beautiful and the food is delicious, about how I do not teach at the International School, though I do live near it, how I like to ride my bicycle.

But once all that is over, Indonesian does what all languages do, which is to say it gets really really hard. The weirdest aspect for me is the way in which individual words are constructed through a process of affixation. Start with a base word – hidup, say, for to be alive, to live – and then with prefixes, suffixes, circumfixes (a prefix and suffix at the same time) and sometimes reduplication you create words like hidup-hidupan (alive), menghidupi (support, provide sustenance for), menghidupan (invigorate, stimulate), kehidupan (life, existence), penghidupan (one’s way of life, livelihood).  There’s enough of a pattern in these affixes to make you think that you can figure out what it is, but that’s mostly illusory. When I’m reading, I can recognize that words with the circumfix ke- -an are nouns usually built from an abstract base, but this is a hopeless thing in conversation, where I simply hear hidup lodged in the middle of some sounds like its own word. Add to it that the best dictionary I have – a two volume set for English-Indonesian and Indonesian-English – makes you look up the word by the base form, so that you have to figure out the base, even though the base changes sometimes when an affix is added (tinggal, to live, becomes meninggalkan, to leave something behind, but you have to look it up under tinggal). This becomes almost comprehensible, as I have said, in reading, but in conversation there are so many me-s and ber-s (the most common prefixes, with multiple variations each) that I become immediately and hopelessly lost.

There are other features that are hard to get used to as well. The part about pronouns being easy fell apart a little when I learned that the language has over 70 variations for you, none of the regular ones being the form you get taught from convenience when you start to learn the language. You marks status and age difference, which is a tricky business inherently for someone who doesn’t like status markers in general (even though I live in a house that screams status marker and have a color of skin that screams the same thing here).  (Using Anda for you, I just learned, is a clear marker of someone just learning the language, but of course simply opening my mouth marks that just fine anyway). There is no pronoun for it so you simply repeat the noun.  There is an official Indonesian form, decreed by the Minister of Culture and Education, which is the Indonesian I am learning but not the Indonesian everyone speaks. (Ibu Frances is good about making these distinctions, however, as part of her campaign against Java-centricity.)

I am more cheerful these days about standing in front of someone staring in wide-eyed incomprehension as they try to answer my simple and practiced question, and I can negotiate my way through to understanding most of the time, at least on a basic level. Most people are patient if somewhat amused at my garbled attempts to communicate. There is progress, and while fluency seems a distant apparition from this perspective, I do imagine that before we leave the country, I’ll be able to have a conversation about something besides how long it is taking me to learn Indonesian. We’ll see, though.