Geared Up for Next Time

Geared Up for Next Time - Dominic Brunaccioni

Good evening! 

As for how my Indonesian is going, Paskalis and I sadly did not meet this week, as I had way too much work to do. Well, that was my story until my Arabic teacher today pushed the dreaded test that I had been hardcore studying to the class next week, so I missed Wednesday’s lesson for nothing. I should be happy, but now I feel cheated out of a good session with Paskalis.

Regardless, we shared with each other what we have prepared for the next session. So I can, at the very least, let you have a glimpse of what my “English lessons” will entail for next week and vice-versa for what he will do with me.

Honestly, Paskalis is kicking some major butt for Indonesian. While I have not gotten close at all of fully memorizing the vocabulary he gave me last week, he has a lot of new vocabulary ready at the helm. We will be doing numbers (angka) next week, which is numbers one through twenty, as well as ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc) and has them going all the way from first to twentieth. That’s a lot! He also wants to start with basic grammar, passive and active transitive verbs, and standard versus non-standard Indonesian sentences. This much work makes me squirm, out of a place of both nervousness and enthusiasm. Hopefully, it won’t be too overbearing for me!

What I have for him is what he requested: Looking at what certain words go in certain sentences. He seemed to enjoy the exercise I made last time, so we are repeating the fill-in-the-blank activity, where he searches where certain words go in specific spots by looking at the contexts of the overall paragraph and each individual sentence. I stole three paragraphs from either previous papers of mine or random passages in my collection of literature in my dorm. Here’s an example of the last paragraph, which is the hardest one. It’s from my World Politics class, for a paper on Constructivism:

Complete the following paragraphs with the words given in each word bank:

[Glanced, Alliances, Controlled, Necessary, Protected, Continent, To be ready, Established]

Take for instance the _______ that the Ottoman Empire had with Europe throughout

history. When the Europeans found it _______ to fight with one another again, they often

_______ towards the Ottomans for help. Ottoman and Maltese historian Elena Augusti notes this

unstable relationship, as “Capitulations _______ their merchants, trade, contracts and cases; they

[Europeans] _______ in the strategic specific places of Mediterranean Western presence and

________, from a privileged inner position, their Muslim interlocutor” (Augusti 292). So if the

Ottomans were to join an alliance with a certain European power, they had ______ for their

“ally” to turn on them at any moment, and to be ready to immediately seek another alliance

elsewhere, in a _______ where there was no easy alliance to be found.

See y’all in class tomorrow, and have a great weekend!

~ Dom