My brain is roti panggang (toast)

Last week I began my official bahasa Indonesia lessons. Holy cow! I love how everyone tells me, "It is an easy language to learn." OK. Maybe if you are a language person and you are used to trying to make your mouth move in ways that you aren't accustom to. This mouth from the south just isn't used to rolling the letter r and trying to make nasal sounds. Also since I can't remember anything longer than a nanosecond, it makes it difficult to construct sentences when you can't recall any of the words you uttered five seconds earlier.

The other thing I love is when my guru (teacher) announces "The sentence structure is just like English." Is that so? Here is a sentence for you, "Mobil Pak Santo baik." The literal translation is "Car Mr. Santo good (or fine or nice)." The sentence structure in English would be, "Mr. Santo's car is good." OK. Is it me, or does the original sentence really not look like the way Mrs. Rogers taught us to compose a sentence in elementary school? Granted, there are times it is laid out the same. At this point, it is a struggle for me to remember when to make it one way of the other.

My friend Karen said while living in France, her language skills improved in direct proportion to the amount of wine she drank. Now Karen, here is my tiny problem. I am residing in an 88% Muslim populated country so it isn't always as easy to get wine. For that matter, with tariffs and such, a bottle of wine that you would pay $15 for in the US would probably be about $56 here. Single bottles of beer are sold in the stores. When I buy two Coronas for us to have with dinner, I pay $3.50 a piece for them or $21 for a six pack. This could explain why they are sold individually. It is constantly like buying beer in a bar, except you don't leave a tip. With that in mind, how in the world will I ever improve my bahasa Indonesia? In Brazil, I would have been fluent in Portuguese in under two weeks after drinking a few caipirinhas.

There is no verb to be. There is no gender. There are no plurals. There is no tense. Those omissions should make things easier. Unfortunately, it is hard to switch off wanting to use am, is and are and to indicate if something is happening now, will happen later, or happened already. I feel like I am saying "Me Tarzan, you Jane" a lot of the time. Poor Hamlet. How would he have ever made his sorrowful speech debating his continued existence in bahasa Indonesia? There would have been no "To be, or not to be." if he had been living in Jakarta. He would have just had to suck it up and get on with it.

The word "dia" covers the pronouns - he;she;him;her;his. See, a nice non-gender specific word. We are not going to expand on that. To make plurals, you say the word twice. The word "orang" is the word for person (FYI - Orangutan is an Indonesian word meaning person of the forest). If you have more than one person you would say orang - orang. So if you wanted to say "There are people in the bathroom." It would be, "Ada orang orang di kamar kecil."
*For the more fluent followers who have had more than two bahasa Indonesia lessons under their belts, please forgive any possible errors that I have made. It may come to light in 6 or 8 weeks that I have it all wrong and it is indeed a piece of cake to learn this language. This just happens to be my interpretation of the situation as I see it at this particular moment.

I also realize that literal translations from any language make for some pretty outlandish sounding sentences to us English speakers. When you are the one trying to string together words, in the correct order, that makes sense within the confines of your head and to the person you are speaking lots of trouble begins.

So sweetums and I text each other in really bad Indonesian and then laugh at ourselves. To add to the amusement is the fact that my hubby is renown for his "Dad" language skills. While in Texas, he would make up the most amazing Dad Spanish words we had ever heard. Then, when he took Portuguese lessons for three years, we had some pretty funny Dad Portuguese floating around the house. I am sure his teacher, Alice, would have laughed herself silly over some of the things he attempted to pass off as real Portuguese words. Now, we are blessed with his version of Indonesian. The up side is that he is currently able to make me laugh in three languages other than English.

Bules in Kemang. Who let 'em in?