Semester was just getting going, and I was struggling to keep up – no, struggling to comprehend anything – in the Politik dan Pemerintahan Afrika small group discussion. At the end of 30 minutes sitting there with what I hoped was a pensive (as opposed to blank) look on my face, I was loath to let my group’s piece of butcher’s paper up to the front of the class. Written in English, it said:
Three Things We Like About South Africa Region:
· Colonised by many different countries (England, Holland, Germany etc)
· All democracy except Lesotho (constitutional monarchy)
· HIV/AIDS epidemic.
What the…?!
Nobody else in the group caught the nasty cringe/gasp combination that choked me when I saw it. Three things we like…colonised…HIV/AIDS epidemic…pretty blue squiggle under the heading for emphasis. I looked away. I felt sick. The din of other groups chatting, scribing and scraping chairs across the floor distracted me momentarily. I looked back at our paper. The cringe and sick feeling returned. What was written there was the first I had understood of the group discussion.
Or had I understood?
This was one critical moment where, as the new foreign student who understood a whopping 60% of the lecture content and who misunderstood approximately one in three assignments, I had to decide whether to let this one slip or whether to suggest maybe the heading, particularly the use of the word ‘like’ could be changed.
Not wanting to shy away from opportunities to engage with classmates, I chose to forget the fear of misunderstanding or being misunderstood, and dive right in.
But dive from which angle? I realised that constructive criticism is not done in the same way in Central Java as it often is in the comparatively blunt land of Aus. I realised the danger of appearing to be the bilingual know-it-all that I wasn’t. Just the week prior I had written a page of notes about the many different uses of water in development, when my sosiology lecturer had actually been talking about studying the constant phenomenon of social change. Above all, I realised I was armed only with my smile, manners and existing vocabulary. My dictionary, a Mirota Kampus special that once told me the word for watchtower meant opium, was rather unreliable.
‘Yes,’ I used my Indonesian ‘This list is very good. But this word – like – it means we really like the things in the list – it means suka.’
Six pensively blank faces stared back at me. The scribe looked confused and asked me to repeat. The second time, there was a flurry of gitu, kok, deh and other informal speech as the group conferred.
“But…like,” the scribe said to me in English, “it means menarik.”
Well, she had me there! A linguistic light turned on in my head. Menarik does mean interesting, but with connotation of being interesting in an arguably likeable way because it comes from tarik – to pull. Tarik, to pull. Menarik, to pull something in. I could see how the scribe got English ‘like’ from Indonesian ‘menarik‘. It was right and yet so wrong for the context.
One thing I now appreciate is that language learning really is more than just vocabulary and grammar. It’s also about learning the art of figuring out when that vocabulary and grammar feels ‘right’, ‘less right’ and just plain ‘wrong’ across a range of new and challenging situations. It’s about having to muddle through and explain yourself through situations that cannot always be pre-empted. The roots of mistakes and misunderstandings can indeed be more complex to dig up than occasional vocabulary slip-ups that result in wishing one’s laundry lady a happy birthday instead of a happy new year, or writing about ‘temple sickness’ or penyakit pura-pura instead of ‘lung cancer’ kanker paru-paru in an exam (I am guilty of both).
I may have just had a language learning epiphany, but decisions in this class were by group consensus and the consensus was to stick with ‘Three Things We Like’. A few minutes later I returned to my seat in the lecture theatre so each group could present. I hurriedly wondered how many times I’d said things in Indonesian that didn’t quite translate. How would I ever know?
As the West African region presented their thoughts, the scribe leaned back over her chair. ‘Actually,’ she whispered, ‘we have decided and you are right. We will change it to say three interesting things about South Africa region.’
‘Oh, ya…’ I smiled.
To me, that’s a beautiful thing about language. While there are some words and expressions that are very context-specific there are others that can be applied to a gamut of situations. ‘Oh, ya…’ used with a smile is one of them in Indonesian. It can end a misunderstanding or keep the peace, at least for the moment. It can save embarrassment and time, providing conclusion without the need to retell an entire story. Used by foreign students it can simultaneously mean ‘yes, please go on’, ‘this sounds interesting’, ‘I need to go now as I’m late for my next class’ and ‘I have totally lost what you’re saying’. Plus, it is practically impossible to mispronounce. In fact if I drew up a list of things I liked about Indonesian language, I daresay ‘Oh, ya…’ with a smile would feature in my top three.
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