Back in Indonesia: My Plan to Be Fluent in 90 Days (Indonesia)
As I emerged from the Sukarno-Hatta airport, immediately many cab drivers reached out there to greet me. One of the drivers walked up to me, asked if I needed a taxi, and began to help me with my things. He didn’t look like the other typical drivers that drove the official sky blue colored vehicles and so I was bit put off (taking the first-approaching, unofficial means of transportation is the perfect way to get kidnapped, bad travel move on my part). Seeing my skepticism, he showed me his badge and we began discussing the price. He initially said, “Dua ratus lima puluh rupiah (250,000 Indonesian rupiah)”. I replied in my heavily foreigner Indonesian “Oh, tidak bisa. Itu mahal sekali. Mungkin seratus tujuh puluh lima rupiah? (I can’t, that’s very expensive. Possibly 175,000rp?). He replied, “Dua ratus empat puluh rupiah (240,000 rp).” He had taken off the equivalent of only $0.86 USD from my $21.50 fare. While I clearly was not winning the game of bargaining, I was gaining ground on the bahasa.
Bahasa Indonesia or literally the Indonesian language is a standardized version of Classical Malay, sometimes referred to as Riau Malay. It also maintains significant overlap with malayu pasar (bazaar or market Malay) and other regional variants that were historically employed as lingua francas of trade through the archipelago. The Dutch employed Malay as the colonial language of their imperial Nederlands- Oost-Indië (Dutch East Indies); however it was later transformed in 1945 into a language of nationalism and anti-colonialism for the new republic being born under Sukarno (Airport name Sukarno-Hatta refers to Indonesia’s first President and Vice-President respectively).
It is the official language of the Republic of Indonesia and has been accepted without serious objections. It serves as a national unifying force since it has very few and restricted expressions of social hierarchy (unlike, say, Javanese which employs various “levels” of speech based on the social hierarchy) and is not associated with any one of the dominant ethnic group. On banners, on television commercials, and various other places, you’ll run across the saying satu nusantara, satu bangsa, satu bahasa, satu Indonesia (one archipelago, one people, one language, one Indonesia).
Part of the reason I started learning Indonesian was so that I could communicate with people across the immense diversity of cultures in the country. Whether in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, Sulawesi, or Papua I could communicate with anyone in hopes understand the Asian-Pacific cultures of this archipelagic region. And I had big plans to hit all of the major areas of Indonesia where I hadn’t been before. But first I needed to up my language game.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, we exchanged the usual “where you’re from? Why have you come to Indonesia?” sort of pleasantries. We then began to talk about life wanting to know was I married yet and why not and such. Although questions such as these may seem super personal, it’s very common to discuss these things upon first meeting someone in Indonesia. We talked for a few hours as I made my way from the airport, through world’s worst traffic ever, to my hotel. We were in the vehicle so long that we had to stop and grab a bite to eat. Jakarta’s traffic is so bad that it’s not customary to bring pillows to try to catch some zzz while you travel from one part of town to another. We had a long time to talk, I took advantage of that. I was proud that I was able to hold that length of a conversation after just jumping back in, but arguable the conversation was quite basic and I felt Iike I was just indiscriminately spewing words out there.
Jakarta’s Traffic
My goal for the next 90 days I’d be in Indonesia was to improve my language skills. My grammar was still reasonable, but I serious lacked vocabulary to express myself fully so I would focus most on this. I also knew that success would only come by taking every opportunity I got to have conversations with people. I decided that when I lacked conversation partners, I’d work to set up conversations through “language exchanges” with university students, an idea I picked up from my time in France (a one hour English for one hour Indonesian sort of thing).
For vocabulary practice, I decided to use the methods outlined by John Del Gaudio for Spanish in his book How to Become Fluent in Spanish. I would write the word 10 times and then quiz myself. I’d plug then into Anki, the space repetition software for future practice. Later, I’d try to slide these new words into each conversation. I’d also use the method outline by super polyglot Benny Lewis where you create a memorable story in order to more effectively retrieve new words from memory.
Writing each word or phrase 10 times.
I have been chatting it up every chance have gotten. All the workers at the hostel know me very well now. The hostel manager also just so happened to be doing her masters at the University of Indonesia and knew a few students that wouldn’t mind doing a language exchange. I met one student already and it went very well. She’d just come back from a summer program for English in Chicago (similar to my Critical Languages Scholarship program I suppose) and we had a great time learning from each other.
The University of Indonesia
I’ll continue to press on in my Indonesian and we’ll see where I am after these 90 days. To “be fluent” is a bit of a vague goal, so maybe I should say that I hope to improve my proficiency so that I can express more fully my thoughts and opinions about things and have smoother conversations. Still vague, but we’ll go with that for now. Maybe by the end of this trip when I’m taking my ride to the airport to leave for Australia I won’t simply be throwing words out there into the conversation hoping the driver understands. Let’s see where this linguistic adventure leads.