Misadventures in Language
A little over a month has passed since my arrival in Indonesia and my days are melting quite nicely into a routine of teaching, coffee shops and weekend trips. In this time, I have experienced the many quirks that make up this strange country and am slowly becoming more culturally acclimated, most prominently shown by learning to speak the language. Though “speaking” the language may be a stretch as I’ve mainly been surviving off of the approximately one hundred words I know and hoping that I will magically become fluent. As you can imagine my linguistic progress has been less than stellar.
Admittedly, I should really try to study more, but when you teach English at a school where literally everyone wants to speak English with you, the incentive to learn Indonesian fades a little to background noise. Sure, they love if I say random words like “luar biasa!” (amazing!) or they giggle when I try to say something as simple as the local word for “Monday,” but in the end they don’t want me to speak their language, they want to learn mine. Because of this, I am doing a sort of learn-on-the-go self-taught program, and by “program” I mean 6 pieces of paper that constitute an Indonesian-English dictionary and occasionally enlisting the help of Google Translate.
Luckily, Indonesian is a fairly simple language, so it’s mostly memorization of vocab at this point. They don’t bother with words like the, a, is, or are. Nobody has time for that. Past and future tenses are also non-existent, and plurals are considerably rare. In any case, I’ve had my fair share of amusing encounters in the learning process and today I am here to share a few of them. The cultural learning curve is steep, let me tell you.
But first, let me bombard you with pictures from teaching at school:
Okay, now that we have out of the way we may proceed...
DA DA, DADA
Let’s start with perhaps the most embarrassing of them all, shall we? I was told that “da da” was an informal way to say goodbye in Indonesian, similar to the English "“bye bye.” I was excited to have a new word in my arsenal, especially a slang one, so naturally I began to use it at absolutely every chance I could. I would proudly say, “da da, guys!” as I waved to students and administrators at the end of the work day, or add a quick “thanks, da da!” when leaving a cafe.
Innocent, right? Wrong.
While studying my Indonesian one day, I began to learn vocabulary for various body parts. All was fine and dandy as I read words like kaki (leg), hati (heart), mata (eyes), dada (chest or breasts)… Wait, what?
Had I just spent the last week proudly yelling “boobs!” to people!?
Had I been casually walking around the school shouting obscenities to children and colleagues with a ginormous smile on my face!? Was I leaving classrooms saying, “Great class today kids, boobs boobs!” Mortified, I asked a fellow teacher, who of course laughed at me, then explained that yes, dada means chest or breasts, but that da da also meant goodbye, and that people knew what I meant when I said it.
PHEW.
Regardless, I’ve since benched the word from my vocab game and opted for other options, just to be safe.
SCIENCE VS. ART
To get to know my students (all 800 of them…), I had them write their name on the whiteboard and something about themselves. Most answers were generic and left something to be desired, things like I like swimming, listening to music, cats or the color blue. Every now and then, however, a fun one popped up that made me smile. In an Indonesian sea of cat-loving swimmers, answers like I like armadillos, slime, and ghosts were sure to be appreciated. Kudos to you kids for standing out in a place that encourages you to be the same. Keep shining you unique, beautiful children, you!
One day, a kid wrote “I like gravvity” and I became tickled with joy. Did he just give a shout-out to science? Does he know Bill Nye the Science Guy!? This kid must be so down to Earth! (Have I ever mentioned my affinity bad puns?) I ended up giving him two thumbs up and saying, “Very cool, science!” to which he looked awfully confused. Naturally, this in turn confused me, so in our state of mutual confusion he uttered a slew of words including, “no” and “paint” and “street.” Ahhhh. You see, this dear boy did not like gravity, oh no, what he liked was graffiti. Figures as much. Well, we corrected the spelling and the age old debate of art versus science continues on.
One day, a kid wrote “I like gravvity” and I became tickled with joy. Did he just give a shout-out to science? Does he know Bill Nye the Science Guy!? This kid must be so down to Earth! (Have I ever mentioned my affinity bad puns?) I ended up giving him two thumbs up and saying, “Very cool, science!” to which he looked awfully confused. Naturally, this in turn confused me, so in our state of mutual confusion he uttered a slew of words including, “no” and “paint” and “street.” Ahhhh. You see, this dear boy did not like gravity, oh no, what he liked was graffiti. Figures as much. Well, we corrected the spelling and the age old debate of art versus science continues on.
FILLED WITH EMBARRASSMENT
I drive a motorbike everyday (I can practically see my Mom cringing through the screen 8,000 miles away), and obviously have to fill up the gas tank. At the station, the attendant asks how much gas I want and the first few times I just mimed what I interpreted “full” to be in the language of broken hand gestures. After doing this dance a couple of times, I decided that “full” was a word that needed to be added to my vocabulary. I Googled the word and used it the next few times I went.
“Berapa?” the gas attendant said, meaning “how much?” to which I proudly smiled and said “kenyang!” or, “full!” They looked at me like I was crazy and asked again, “Berapa?” Disappointed, and looking like a kicked puppy at my failure, I resorted back to my miming. This same scenario happened about three more times.
Eventually I learned that Indonesians have specific words for very specific things. In English, the word “full” encompasses everything from the fullness of glasses with liquids to the amount of joy in your heart. In Indonesian, penuh means “to fill” and kenyang means “to be filled from food.”
So every time the attendant asked how much gas I wanted, I had excitedly responded with the amount of food I’d eaten that day. Basically the following is what transpired on multiple occasions:
Attendant: “How much gas?”
Me: “I ate a really big lunch today!”
Attendant: “No, how much gas do you want?”
Me: “Seriously guys, I’m really full, no more food please!”
I’d look at me like I was crazy, too.
PAGING DR. DAUGHTER
Things to know about Indonesians:
1. They LOVE taking pictures
2. Their sense of time is extremely skewed; 10 minutes can mean anything between 5 seconds and 10 hours
Taking these facts into consideration, it is safe to say that "just one picture!" and "fast picture please!" means nothing remotely close to the the number "one" or the speed known as "fast." They love selfies and when a young white girl pops in (ahem, me) all hell breaks lose. I am asked for my picture all the time and one day an older co-worker asked for a photo together. After 17 pictures from 6 different angles that at one point included 8 other people, she giddily exclaimed that she couldn’t wait to show the picture of us to her doctor. What? I was very confused. Was she heading to the clinic soon and going to say, “Hey Doc, can you look at this weird cut on my foot? Also, check out this white girl I have a picture with!”
Whatever, Indonesia is the weirdest country ever so I didn’t question it.
I realized later that she probably meant daughter, not doctor. Indonesian doesn’t use soft g’s, so they mistakenly pronounce many English words with a hard “g” making “daughter” sound like “dogter.” Ahhhhhh, mystery solved! (And far less strange than the former scenario.)
SO IT GOES...
I could go on and on with all the amusing instances of language miscommunications. Like the time I asked a student what the topic for his paper was and, like lightning, he ran to his backpack and put on his traditional Islamic hat only to run back to me as if waiting for more instructions. I realized he thought I said “topi,” the Indonesian word for “hat,” rather than “topic.” Kudos on his speed though.
To save myself from too much embarrassment and because I’m sure you don’t have the time to read 85 pages worth of language mistakes, I will leave it at that and just say that these little encounters add spice to the already seasoned meal known as cultural acclimation. If incorrect language is the spice, then I’m making one hell of a hot dish.