Language
I'm really starting to think that people in Indonesia have been blessed with tremendous language abilties. For example:Everyone can speak Bahasa Indonesia, the national language. Bahasa doesn't seem too hard to learn (so far!) because there are no tenses and you repeat most words to make plurals. Those words are my favorite, like:
bunga-bunga: flowers
kadang-kadang: sometimes
anak-anak laki-laki: boys
Bahasa is fun to pronounce, but hard to understand when spoken really fast.
After that, a lot of people in Malang (which is in East Java) speak Javanese. Javanese is spoken by over 100 million people across the Indonesian achipelago. It is VERY complicated, not only due to the difficult pronounciation, but because there are three distinct forms of the language: low, middle, and high. Depending on the social situation, you have to use the correct form of Javanese. The Javanese I know so far is limited to:
maturnuwun or kesuwun: thank you (I don't know what form)
sugung enjing, sugung siang, sugung dalu: good morning, afteroon, night
sami-sami: you're welcome
Javanese words also start with ng- a lot, a sound I find impossible to make.
Besides these two, many other people speak their "mother tongues," or their ethnic language, like Bataknese, Muduranese, or Balinese. My nighbors Pak and Ibu Putu speak Balinese, and their kids, Made and Eka, told me it was so hard that they hadn't picked it up even after 10 years of hearing their parents speak it everyday.
After that, Indonesians start to learn English. By the time they take English in primary school, they're working on their fourth language.
And Americans complain about having to learn two!
posted by Caitlin @ 7:16 PM
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