Lessons Learned and Aspirations

Lessons Learned and Aspirations - Dominic Brunaccioni

So I had my first meeting with my Indonesian language exchange partner today, and all I can is, well, nothing. I prepared a whole bunch of stuff for him, and I didn't get too much from him on his end. That's okay, though, as he explained he will be ready next week. We did go over the Indonesian alphabet, which is extremely similar to the English alphabet, with more literal pronunciation of vowel letters, much like Italian. One difference I did note is that "Q" is pronounced like "Chee", which I found interesting.

One trouble that I noticed Paskalis having is plural agreements, especially in more complicated and heavy grammatical sentences, which in his graduate-level papers are very common. Words like "background", "identity", and "language" were constantly tripping him up when he attempted to change them to their plural forms. So, in preparation for next week, I will create a few sentences that need to have a plural agreement and give it to him like an exercise.

Not all of Paskalis's problems are stemming internally, though, as I realized that he refers to Google Translate when attempting to translate certain words from Indonesian to English.

In his sentence, "Students of Papuan tribes have two major categories of lifestyle which is individualistic and mutual cooperation manners", Paskalis is attempting to convey that Papuan students either work individually or in groups. I originally had no idea what "mutual cooperation manners" meant until I read it in the context of the sentence, and realized that Paskalis simply meant "Teamwork" or "Group work".

To fix his problem, I referred him to Thesaurus instead of Google Translate, as many of us know that Google isn't as accurate as we would like it to be when it comes to specific word translation and exact meaning. Hopefully, that will help him in the future.

Can't wait to dive into Indonesian next week!

- Dom