Posted by John
Any linguist will tell you Indonesian is an easy language to learn.
Unlike most other Asian languages, it uses the same alphabet as English. Those 26 Roman characters create a comforting sense of familiarity from the outset, whereas Chinese, Japanese and Korean pictograms seem deliberately designed to disorient the uninitiated.
What’s more, Indonesian verbs don’t have tenses and never need to be conjugated, so no endless series of “amo, amas, amat” exercises for the beginning student. If you, I, he or we love someone—even if we ever loved someone—“cinta” will do. That may seem confusing at first, but you learn to pick up the meaning from pronouns and context. It’s a small sacrifice, considering the fact that it liberates you from having to remember which endings belong with which verbs.
Ever have trouble remembering when to use “good” and when to use “well”? No such problem exists in Indonesian, since adjectives and adverbs usually take the exact same form. To mix metaphors and languages here for a minute, in Indonesian you may not be feeling very baik, but you can still remain in someone’s baik graces.
You’re probably getting the hang of this already.
There’s a reason why Indonesian is considered so easy to learn. It’s a recent innovation, formalized in the early 20th century as a nationalist project to unite Indonesia’s more than 100 ethnic groups on more than 1,000 islands, each group with its own language. It has its origins in the Malay trade language that has permeated the Indonesian archipelago for centuries of maritime commerce (and which is still spoken in Malaysia as well).
Like most aspects of Indonesian life, the national language incorporates foreign influences when they’re found to be suitable. In addition to the language’s Malay roots, there’s a sprinkling of Dutch words. No reason to reject the colonial language out of hand when it’s found to be useful. There’s a light Portuguese linguistic footprint as well, owing to these Europeans’ presence in Indonesia in the 16th century (they stayed in East Timor until the 1970s). Throw in a few words from the Islamic language of Arabic, some Sanskrit terms from Indonesia’s Hindu forbearers, and you’re in business.
Finding a linguistic vehicle to bring together a disparate population in the modern era requires a commitment to simplicity. People won’t give up their own languages unless you make it worth their while, so you can’t hold on to archaic conventions and quirky rules solely for the sake of posterity. The new language must be sensible, convenient, and above all rational—the linguistic equivalent of the metric system.
Yet for all the purported ease of the Indonesian language, my four hours of daily one-on-one intensive language training sessions in Yogyakarta last week were beginning to take on the feeling of an interrogation by the Grand Inquisitor. This struggle occurs despite the fact we’re at Wsima Bahasa, the best language school in the country and the “Grand Inquisitors” of my imagination are incredibly competent instructors who, truth be told, treat us with kid gloves.
Spending an extended period of time surrounded by an unfamiliar language is perhaps the most disorienting of human experiences. Sessions at Indonesian language boot camp leave me feeling deprived of my senses and doubting instincts I’ve learned to trust over the course of a lifetime. I know the red light in the center of the road means “stop” in any language, but what happens when I start speaking Indonesian and “go” comes out instead?
Each session became a test of willpower and endurance. The heat, unfamiliar noises, forced repetition, teachers’ intent gazes, flashes of recognition betrayed by defective memory or stammered diction—at the end of each class, I was ready to confess to a major crime.
You wouldn’t know it from this melodramatic description, but 90 percent of my Indonesian language training sessions are actually conducted in English. My instructors speak my native language better than I do, so much so that I’m surprised when they ask after the meaning of some American idiom I’ve employed. So this isn’t a prisoner-of-war situation where I’m caught far behind enemy lines—there’s always a ready escape hatch of English, an escape hatch I’ve readily employed with little shame.
Still, these Indonesian language lessons have been the first time in a while I’ve been on the receiving end of the inherent power relationship embedded within language. In a world where everyone learns English as a second language, I usually wield the whip hand, whether I realize it or not. So the next time I’m caught in line in the United States behind someone struggling a bit with the English idiom, I’ll be a bit more forgiving.
A neurologist could probably explain exactly why there’s dispiritingly small space left in the 34-year-old brain to acquire language. I really wasn’t looking for an explanation, however. I just knew something had to give, so I asked (or had Danielle translate my request) to reduce my sessions to 2 hours a day. Mercifully, the school agreed.
I celebrated the first day of my newfound freedom—two hours each day in the late morning—with a trip to the barber. I’ve surely learned enough Indonesian, I thought, to handle this basic task. I’d already had that unfortunate incident last week when my hair clippers exploded after I’d failed to plug in the proper wattage converter, so I eventually had to do something. With my close-cropped hair, it wasn’t like much could go wrong. Or so I thought.
I never made it to the recently rechristened “Obama’s” barbershop. The intense heat had me detour instead to a nearby salon that billed itself as “styling for women and men.” When I stepped through the front door, the stylists looked at me a bit quizzically. Does this guy want a perm or something?
A few seconds of halting dialogue between us, and they quickly realized that my Indonesian wasn’t sophisticated enough to articulate or comprehend such advanced hairstyling concepts as “layers” or “highlights.” And with my hair, it’s not like Rapunzel just walked in to their establishment. At a loss for the right Indonesian words, I drew my hand over my short locks, pantomiming what I envisioned as the universal sign for a Johnny Unitas flat-top.
My stylist nodded in what seemed liked agreement, but somehow I ended up being escorted over to the sink. Before I knew it, there was shampoo in my hair. This was a bit more than I bargained for, but with the exchange rate in Indonesia, it was all going to come out to $3 anyway, so I figured I might as well smile and try to enjoy it.
Once I was back in the stylist’s chair, he proved a bit more fastidious with the clippers than I was expecting. To my mind, there’s only so many ways to style a flat-top, but I appreciated his sense of professional dedication. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I was back at the shampoo station, having my hair rinsed. Shouldn’t be long and I’ll be out of here, I thought.
At that point, however, I was handed off to what I presumed was another stylist. She showed me the haircut in the mirror and asked a question, which I in my haste assumed to be Indonesian for, “Do you like it?” Ready to leave the salon, I nodded yes and said “Bagus,” which I had learned as the all-purpose Indonesian version for “It’s good.”
Having expressed my satisfaction, I expected this new stylist to pull off my smock and bring me over to the cash register. Instead, she started anointing my scalp with oil. Again, this was pleasant enough, but it seemed curious. When I said, “Bagus,” had I fully understood the question?
She continued running her fingers over my scalp and down my neck. By the time she reached my shoulder, I realized, to my horror, that she’d asked, “Would you like a massage?” And I, in deploying the little Indonesian I knew, had nodded my head resolutely and said, to her ear anyway, “Sounds good! Sure!”
I’ve spoken metaphorically here about how paralyzing it can be to not know how to say something in the predominant language, but there was nothing metaphorical about this. It was paralyzing. I was having my shoulders poked, my back prodded, and the space between my fingers probed for their pressure points. The stylist—or perhaps she actually was the salon’s in-house masseuse, what did I know?—wasn’t shy about putting her hands down the back of my shirt to get those treacherous knots that were only tensing up more as my shock increased. It’s usually relaxing to have a massage, but I was desperate to find a way to call for this “relaxation” to come to an end.
But how would I do that? I had just learned that using “bagus”—“it’s good”—would only bring on another round of potentially more compromising contortions. Think, John, think. In the Indonesian language unit on bargaining, there was a phrase you are supposed to use when you wanted to bring the haggling to a close. What was it?
As my fingers were being bent in every direction, vocabulary lessons flashed before my eyes. I could say “rice,” “clock,” maybe “airplane” if I really thought about it. But what message would that send? They’d probably be harmless nonsequiturs, and they certainly wouldn’t help me out of my predicament. Worse yet, by saying “airplane,” would I unwittingly be calling for some more complex and potentially permanently damaging massage maneuver?
My brain, at the breaking point, finally alighted on “Tidak apa lagi,” or, “No, nothing more.” After all my complaints about language immersion, I was suddenly painfully aware of the merits of intensive classes. As the massage continued, I bided my time, confident that the next time the stylist cum masseuse spoke, I could pull the plug on the whole thing.
“Tidak apa lagi,” I said a few minutes later, and with that, deliverance. At that moment, they were the three most beautiful words in the Indonesian language.
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