Language Update

We have now been living at Saung Angklung Udjo for one month and have established a comfortable and easy way of life here, although some of the initial excitement and motivation of the group as a whole has worn off a little, which is maybe why I haven’t written a blog for a while. Part of the reason for this is that our final performance still seems so far away, and yet we’re practicing for it every day. It would be nice if we had some smaller and closer goals or performances to work towards – this would encourage us to practice in our own time and turn up to lessons on time (which has been a bit of a problem recently, for some people!).

After a month my Bahasa Indonesia is getting better, although I still feel that if this is one third of how good it’s going to be by the time I leave here, I need to start improving at a faster rate! Before I came here I was told that Bahasa Indonesia is an easy language to learn. And at the beginning it was! Words are fairly easy to pronounce and remember so I learnt a lot of words very fast, and the basic phrases for ‘how are you’, ‘my name is’, ‘thank you’ etc came naturally after the first week. But as we learnt more we started to encounter the various complexities and idiosyncrasies of the language, and these are slightly more difficult to get my head around. I am at the stage where I need to learn these complexities to progress, but it’s getting slower and harder with every new aspect I come across.

Sometimes there appears to be a distinct lack of rules. At the end of many words there is a silent ‘k’, but there doesn’t seem to be a system explaining when the k is silent and when it’s pronounced – you just have to learn it. Cintak (love) and bapak (or just pak, used to address older men) both have a silent k, while in the word duduk (sit) the k is prounounced. The one word tidak (with a silent k, obviously) means no, not, don’t, and many other variations implying a negative, but then sometimes, and I can’t quite work out exactly when, I am told by my teacher that I can’t use the word tidak in this case but have to use bukan instead. There is a lack of gender words – dia means both him and her, as well as he and she, while adding the suffix ‘nya’ to a noun means the object is both his or hers. So if you’re not familiar with Indonesian names, it’s sometimes difficult to work out if someone is talking about a woman or a man.

At other times there are complicated rules which would be embarrassing to get wrong, such as ways of addressing people respectfully which is very important here. To address an older man, maybe aged 50 or over, you would use the word bapak, usually shortened to just pak, which means ‘father’. But you wouldn’t use this word while addressing your actual father; in this case you would use ayah. To address a man closer to your own age but with a position of authority, you use the word kang, and the polite way of addressing any man your own age is mas. There are also formal and informal ways to say almost everything, and you need to use the appropriate way of speaking depending on who you are speaking to and the situation you’re in.

The grammatical system is called ‘imbuhan’ which is a system of suffixes and prefixes which change root words to their correct form. In some cases this seems simple and logical. Makan is ‘to eat’ and adding ‘an’ to the end turns the verb into noun making makanan meaning ‘food’.  There are certain suffixes which turn a word into its past tense, but sometimes you don’t need to use these. Suda makan? means ‘already eaten?’ although there is no change to the root word for ‘eat’. I feel like once I have mastered imbuhan I will be able to construct sentences properly, but for now I’m stuck with using what our silat teacher calls ‘bahasa tarzan’ which consists of a lot of gesturing and shouting out random words in the hope that I will make myself understood.

Despite the difficulties, I am really enjoying learning a new language! I feel like every new word I learn gives me greater power to communicate and understand, although I really have to work to not forget the words! Listening to conversations between my Indonesian friends, I am managing to pick out more and more words and sometimes can get the general meaning of what they’re talking about. It’s still hard trying to talk to local people or get information when I really need it though, for example asking for directions when I’m out in Bandung. The amount I still have to learn just to have a basic conversation is overwhelming.

[As an edit: kang (used to address a man closer to your own age) is actually Sundanese, not Bahasa Indonesia! Here both languages are used, so when talking to people here and addressing our teachers and friends it's easy to get mixed up between the two!]