Learning Indonesian in America

By Heather Christie s27
St Lawrence University

When I first thought about learning Indonesian as a language, I really had no other motive than to see if the claim that it was the easiest language in the world was true. Yes, that really is all I wanted to do. I’m a language freak and usually I start learning languages simply because I want to, so Indonesian at least had a semi-reason. I had a friend who had been there, so I asked him about it and he taught me my first Indonesian phrase: telur mata sapi. In essence, it means sunny side up egg, or egg like the eye of a cow. I never even used it once in Indonesia.

He did have some books though, so about a week later I received both the English-Indonesian and Indonesian to English dictionaries, (the Echols-Shadily 1984 editions) and a little red book titled ‘How to Master the Indonesian Language.’ I spent a while with just these books, but felt I needed a bit more than two dictionaries and a very small guide to the language. I went on amazon.com and looked for some books because surely there had to be some, right? Well, I found some books and ordered them, but they weren’t exactly stellar. In reality they were really sort of bad.

In the States, there aren’t as many Indonesian courses as, say, Australia. I had at least one person, when told I was going to Indonesia, say, “Have a good time in Africa, then.” Not that there are NO Indonesian courses, just that there aren’t many.

I live in Rhode Island and go to school in northern New York, so the closest one to me was Brown, in Providence (capital of Rhode Island). The only problem was that these courses were extremely expensive and there is no way a college student on a budget can pay $US140 for every meeting of just 2 hours!

So I was stuck. No classes, no books, what in the world was I supposed to do? Well, this is where I got creative. Some people say I was insane, but I say I was brilliantly resourceful. I went online and went to the BBC. While I had been learning Spanish we had to listen to the Spanish BBC for class. Granted, Spanish is much more common than Indonesian (at least in the States), but I tried anyway and sure enough, there was a BBC edition in Indonesian. That meant I could get articles as well as listen to the radio in Indonesian. It was pretty spiffy.

I then continued my online extravaganza in searching for an Indonesian book store. I had done a semester in Costa Rica for Spanish and learned a lot once I had bought Harry Potter (the first one) in Spanish. I planned to find the same book, but this time in Indonesian. (Disclaimer here, I’m not obsessed, I simply know that Harry Potter is currently the most popular series in the world and therefore had the biggest chance of being in Indonesian.) I stumbled upon Gramedia online and ordered a copy, which came maybe three weeks later.

Then I went online again and found a program called Before You Know It (BYKI). This is a flash card program for the computer which provides vocabulary lists in various languages, including Indonesian. I had to pay $US75 for the deluxe version, but it was well worth the price as this program became an integral part of my language learning endeavor (and still is).

Then I bought an iPod. The BYKI program had an audio recording bit that you could stick on your iPod to practice when you were not in range of your computer. I would play vocab lists on my way to class and learn a fair amount of words that way. Some were fairly useless, like paling disenangi for “favorite” (I never used it, not that phrase), but others, like sendok (spoon) came in handy.

I then went online again and found a podcast called Learning Indonesian. The account that makes you pay more has quite useful vocabulary and grammar help on it, so I did the whole Premium deal, got the podcast, and stuck that on my iPod as well. It was grand.

Over the summer I had a binder that I made with various quizzes, tests, essays, articles, etc that I could use. The test and quizzes I created, but long before I actually took them, so that I would forget what the answers were. The essays, I would give myself a topic, write something, and then look it over to see if I caught any mistakes. Not that it was the best way to do it, but when no one else around knows Indonesian, it works. I also wrote for fifteen minutes every day just about random stuff. Looking back on some of that now is like looking back on things I did is third grade. It’s cute, but I hope no one else sees it.

And with Harry Potter (yes, I’m coming back to it), I read it, sure, but as I was reading it I underlined every word I didn’t know, looked it up, and entered it into a spreadsheet on my computer, making a Harry Potter dictionary. I also circled words I had already looked up, but had forgotten the meaning of. At the end of the page, I counted the underlines and the circles, then counted the number of words on the page and would figure out what percentage of the page I understood, what percentage I should have understood but forgot, and which percentage I had no reason to understand, but should learn. The first page scored a resounding 62% known, the rest unknown, which was ok, but not great given the amount of time I had spent learning the stuff. The last page I have data for was page 30 in which 90.9 percent was understood. The page before was 95.1% and the page before that was 94.7%. So for all my craziness, it actually worked!

And it worked well. I had only been studying for a year by the time I got to Indonesia and only studying with my crazy regime for about six months. I got into Bali, found a hotel, got up, got the plane the next day, and got into Yogya perfectly fine. In fact, when we took the placement test, I scored a 53, which is quite intermediate level. I signed up for two Inculs courses and three immersion, but then sat in the intermediate grammar class and realized I knew everything the lecturer was saying. So I went to the office and switched up to advanced grammar right with everyone who had been studying the language for years. Now, I probably wasn’t as savvy as them, but in the end, I think my Indonesian skills were as good as anyone else’s and I did quite well in that advanced class.

So if you’re an American who wants to study Indonesian and find a university that will help you, I’m sorry, this article completely failed to answer your question. Unless you are near the very few universities that do have a program and can afford it, you’re not going to find much outside help in the States. But it is definitely possible to learn the language on your own to the degree that is needed to go to Indonesia. You just have to really work at it and really want it. And I’ve already provided numerous sources in here, so there really is no excuse now!