Polish feels easy

Greetings, Earthlings,

Just over two months down here now, and still no formal language classes being offered up here on 'the ridge', yet. So I've been piecing together my own studies from several language books, many passed on to me from my dad when he had worked in Jakarta several years ago with Lucent, and from a 'Learning Indonesian' podcast. And learning a bit here and there from our pembantu, the drivers and one or two other expats who know a decent amount of Indonesian.

Now, Polish is considered by the CIA to be in the top ten of the most difficult languages for a native English speaking person to master. The sounds are difficult for us to make, with their three different z's and multiple a's, e's, c's, strange dipthongs, etc. Fortunately, at least the intonation was similar to ours, with questions rising at the end, etc.. After four years of living in Polska I had a decent 'tourist/resident' vocabulary. I could understand a good amount and could communicate my needs in town, while traveling, in a store and in a bar or restaurant. I could listen to some guy's (sad and/or funny) story in a bar but I couldn't fully talk back (gesturing is key!). So, I was fully at the level of what couchsurfing.com would consider 'Intermediate."

Here, however, the language is officially known as 'Bahasa Indonesia,' which translates to 'the language of Indonesia.' There really is no one language, there's over 300. The bahasa Indonesia (BH) is a generic trade language created over the centuries and fine tuned by the Dutch a 100+ years ago and re-taught officially in the schools. You don't say, 'I speak English'. You say, "I can speak the language of/from England'.

Before coming here, everyone I knew whom had lived here a few years kept saying how easy the language is here to learn, but I'm not finding that so. Yes, there are, supposedly, no tenses, the alphabet is mostly the same as ours (though the pronunciation of individual letters is closer to Polish than English, i.e. the letter 'a' sounds like 'ah', 'i' sounds like English 'e', so at least the Indonesians can pronounce Iza's name correctly ;-) But what is really tripping me up so much, so far, is the damned syllables!

Example:
If you want to say in Polish, "I don't speak Polish." it translates to, "Nie, mowie po Polsku."
The English syllable count for the phrase is: 5 (with the contraction on don't).
The Polish count is: 7 (almost 6 if you keep 'nie' down to one stretched out syllable and combine the i and e in mowie (pronounced move-e-yeah/n).

Now, the same simple phrase in bahasa Indonesia is this mouthful:
"Saya tidak bisa bicara bahasa Indonesia." (!)
Phonetically we can Anglosize that to: SIGH-uh TEE-dock BEE-suh bee-CHAR-uh buh-HAAS-suh een-doh-NEEs-yah

This syllable count amounts to: 16 syllables!
Yikes! So that is more than double the count of Enlish or Polish. So, as you can see, it takes a non-native speaker a long, long time to utter such a simple, necessary phrase.

The fact that I can now say such a phrase to the locals, though, makes them smile and say, 'Yes, you can speak bahasa Indonesia! And, very well!'

;-)

We never really learn languages until we have to use them. I 'learned' French so long ago in high school, and never had to really use it until the summer we climbed Mont Blanc (see way, way below, 2004 or 5?), and the French hated my French, anyway. They would have none of it, except for 'Merci' and 'Au revoir' when I was leaving their presence.

Now that I'm having to shift gears to a completely new language, my brain automatically processes its trained and engrained Polish before bahasa Indonesian. Even today, after more than two months in our new country, in a two minute conversation-out of my mouth came, "Dzien dobry panu. Tak. Dzieki. Nie, and almost the Polish mouthful, "Przepraszam"!
I recovered partially, and I should have been saying, "Selamat pagi, pak. Ya. Terima kasih. Tidak." And I did say, "Maaf" (MA-aaf), correctly, after all my slip ups.

Thankfully the Indonesians are very forgiving,
and always smiling.


So back to the BI books I go...



Fall break is coming up quickly... we're going to Bali, so stay tuned!