Since our arrival here in Medan Kali and I have been working hard to learn the Indonesian language. We have been amazed at the progress so far. Like most realms of knowledge, the more we learn about Bahasa Indonesia the more we realize how much more we have to learn. Thus, we are so thankful for our language school and for this time to be able to dedicate ourselves to learning the language. It is a tremendous amount of work and we couldn’t imagine trying to learn on our own or with our time and attention divided by other things.
After Thanksgiving the structure of our language classes changed significantly. We spend far less time on grammar lessons and we have fewer new words to write down. Thankfully, we have come to a point where we can communicate effectively with our teachers. (There’s still some more learning to be done before we can effectively communicate with the average person on the street because the average person on the street does not know which words we have already learned like our teachers do.) For the last two months we have been reading longer stories and articles and giving speeches in class. It is a different kind of hard. We read through a story and we are encouraged to find the meaning of new words from context rather than from a dictionary. If we don’t know the words our teacher will explain their meaning using other Indonesian words. Then we are given some example questions for our interviews. The next day we retell the story or article in Indonesian and from memory as best we can. Then we present an essay in Indonesian based on our interviews from the previous day. There is a test to check our progress every week.
Our teachers continue to be gracious with us as we learn slowly. We have also been blessed to be able to bring Caroline to class with us. (Caroline has just started to stay home while we are at class.) We have come so far! We are a long way past learning colors, the names of food, or the days of the week. (Although sometimes our brains decide to forget a name, color, or day every now and again) There is so much more to learn, but we are beginning to feel as though our head is at least above water.