Ten hours from now, I will be boarding a plane to start my first international trip –
to Indonesia! :D
I am going to visit my brother and his wife, who have both been teaching English as Peace Corps volunteers for a little over a year. We’ve got a whole two-week trip planned, visiting various places on the various islands. As may be expected, I am extremely excited and also a little stressed.
What clothes should I pack? What things do I need to do with my phone to ensure I can call my girlfriend in the states? How should I carry and store my money, and passport? What about shaving and other personal stuff? Are there any cultural norms in the area that I should be aware of? Oh god, I don’t know the language!
Well, I decided that I would spend some time learning a bit of basic bahasa Indonesia.
Bahasa is a word derived from Sanskrit that means “spoken language”. So, to say “bahasa Indonesia” is to say “the language of Indonesia”. From my reading, I have found that bahasa Indonesia is related to Malay and is thus an Austronesian language. Given Indonesia’s large population, bahasa Indonesia is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (14th, per Wikipedia). What’s better? It uses the Roman script (sweet!).
At the suggestion of my brother, I opted to learn a bit of Indonesian via the website Memrise. If you’re not familiar with Memrise, I would recommend it. It’s been completely free for me (so far), and I’ve managed to very quickly cover approximately 60 vocabulary words and some syntax. I have found it to be effective, and the exercises avoid feeling like a chore. As I am only engaging in a crash course, I imagine that prolonged and protracted use of the service would yield even better results.
One critique I have had is that Memrise has yet to teach me basic phrases like, “Hello.” Or “My name is…” or “How are you?”, etc. It has, however, taught me how to tell a girl that she is fat.
Seriously, Memrise?
I decided to use what I had learned to form a much more complimentary and flattering phrase: Wanita itu adalah bunga. (That woman is a flower.)
I’ve also learned a few colors: kuning (yellow), putih (white), hitam (black), ungu (purple), merah (red), coklot (brown), and biru (blue). Additionally, I've learned to modify these colors with combinations like biru muda (light blue).
Now, I learned biru muda before I learned any other color modifiers. Naturally, since biru means blue, I assumed that muda meant “light”. So, when I learned that pink is “merah muda”, I assumed that the word for pink in Indonesian was literally “light red”. This made me giddy because I thought that I was oh-so super smart to have noticed it.
Nope! Turns out that the word “muda” actually means “young”, and so biru muda and merah muda are closer to young blue, and young red than they are to light blue and light red.
Curious, I attempted to discover an etymology that made sense to me about why the word for “young” would be meant to convey a lighter shade. How had this come to be? Perhaps, in the past, muda meant something like “lesser”?
Well, not exactly.
I had a difficult time conveniently locating etymological information for the Indonesian language. Instead, I looked into the etymology of the word “light”. It seems that the word “light” derives from the proto-indo-european root “legwh-“, which meant “not heavy, having little weight”. Young things have little weight, and so perhaps that may be a way for my brain to comprehend the use of “young” to describe the “lighter” shades of colors? Who knows, mental acrobatics are fun, though. ☺
Now that we know some colors, maybe we want to say something like: That woman is a beautiful pink flower. To do so, we need to employ the verb “adalah”, which has the same function as the word “is” does in English. Our result would be, “Wanita itu adalah bunga merah muda.” Note that in Indonesian, adjectives come after the words they are describing. So, in English, we would say “pink flower” (adjective-noun), and in Indonesian we would say “bunga merah muda” (noun-adjective).
What if we want to argue with Memrise, and say that the woman is not fat? We disagree Memrise, and that was super rude of you!
Here we would need a word for negation, a word like “no”. Well, we have one in the form of “tidak.” The result would then be, “Wanita itu tidak gemuk.” Wanita itu tidak gemuk literally means “that woman is not fat” – but what if we want to take a slightly different angle? What if we want to say the subtly different, “That is not a fat woman”? Well, then we would need the word “bukan”, and we would phrase it as, “Itu bukan wanita gemuk.”
I also learned words for man (pria), poor (miskin), wealthy (kaya), boy (anak laki-laki), girl (anak perempuan), table (meja), shirt (kemeja), dog (anjing), person (orang), small (kecil), tall (tinggi), short (pendek), and a slew of others that don’t come to the front of my mind, at the moment.
I still don’t know how to say “Hello.”, though. As the population of Indonesia is predominatly Muslim, I have been told that traditional Arabic greetings usually suffice. Therefore, I will attempt to draw on my brief study of the Arabic language and probably try phrases like, “Marhaba!” (مرحبا), and “Sabah alkhyr!” (صباح الخير) which are used to indicate “Hello!” and “Good morning!”, respectively.
I absolutely love language and languages and have had a really pleasant time throughout my introduction to bahasa Indonesia. The Roman script definitely helped in the process. I honestly don't know how much of what I learned on Memrise will be functionally useful to me on my short trip (two weeks seems like forever, though), but I appreciated the experience of becoming familiarized, even in just a small way, with the culture through a brief introduction to the language.
Wish me luck, and I'll see all y'all Steemit peeps when I get back! :) Thanks for reading, and talk to you soon!
Looks like all that language studying over the years is paying dividends! Ask around over there and find some steemian folks! Right there you have something great in common.
I hope you have a blast! I hope you can post some kind of update from there, but if not then make good images and give us all a thorough write-up when you get home.
All love is yours, so take some for the rest of the family and spread it lavishly!
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