Beginning Bahasa and Explaining English

Beginning Bahasa and Explaining English - Dominic Brunaccioni





It was week two of my language exchange with Paskalis, and I have to say that I’m super impressed with what he prepared for me. It was very formal and organized. We practiced a basic conversation:





“What’s your name?” [Siapa nama Anda?]





“My name is Dominic. What’s yours?” [Nama saya Dominic. Siapa nama Anda?]





“Mine is Paskalis”. [Nama saya Paskalis.]





“Where do you live?” [Di mana Anda tinggal?]





“I live in Maryland, and you?”[Saya tinggal di Maryland, dan Anda tinggal di mana?”





“I live in Connecticut” [Saya tinggal di Connecticut.]





You get the idea. I don’t want to bore you with the nitty-gritty stuff, but we practiced the pronunciation of those words together to form basic sentences. I also learned some vocab, with the theme being members of the family. He then gave me whole paragraphs of Indonesian text, and asked me to read it out. Although I had no idea what the heck I was saying, it was great for me to learn how to pronounce the language. I’m really happy with what I’ve been given, Paskalis really seems to know what he’s doing with the language, and although you may say “No duh, he’s from Indonesia!”, most Indonesians learn Indonesia as their second language, and really only use it in school. Their regional language is what they learn first, so Indonesian is a new language just as much as it was to Paskalis when he learned it years ago. So, in my book, he’s doing amazing.





Now, for the flip side, I prepared two exercises for Paskalis to better ace English and its many complexities. I went through some of my schoolwork and novels and pulled random sentences from them that had plural nouns and adjectives. I then purposefully changed them to the singular tense and asked Paskalis to read the sentence, understand the errors, and fix them. Hopefully, this will translate to his actual work routine in the future. The other aspect we worked on is synonyms, as Paskalis struggles with understanding as to what words to use in certain scenarios, and how they sound in a sentence when added. So I did the classic vocab quiz-esque exercise where I had Webster dictionary sentences of words, then deleting the word in the sentences, and making a word bank for a fill-in-the-blank. This was not easy for him, and I explained that while there are “wrong” and “right” answers about language, especially English, many parts of language are interchangeable. It’s just the practice and repetition of words in sentences that will help you understand which words go where at whichever time. See y’all next week!