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I’m currently holed up in Yogyakarta, spending six hours a day doing intensive one-on-one Indonesian language classes and the rest of the time wandering around my neighborhood in a dazed state, like I’ve become stoned on the complexity of transitive and intransitive verbs.

I’ve lived in Indonesia for a year and a half. I can hold an OK conversation about most of the important topics commonly raised by taxi drivers and other locals in the areas I have traveled to so far.

I can talk about which types of Indonesian food I like, or about what parts of Indonesia I have visited and how beautiful they are. I can talk about why I’m not married yet, and I can turn down marriage proposals from pedicab drivers in a tactful way that shows consideration for their feelings. I can say “korupsi,” “polisi” or “politisi,” and when a cab driver goes off on a lengthy emotional rant, I can comprehend enough to look concerned and shake my head, which thankfully seems to be all the input he is looking for.

I can prattle away, throwing in key flattering phrases like “suka sekali” (“like a lot”) and “enak sekali” (“very delicious”), and people will nod and smile and tell me how wonderful my Indonesian is. They laugh if I throw in some slang and laugh a lot when I bring up my personal favorite topic — Manohara Odelia Pinot.

But I often walk away mindful that people have been telling me my Indonesian was good since the first week I arrived and had started to get my tongue around “terima kasih” (“thank you”). I began to think that maybe I should not take the compliments as an indicator of actual skill. That’s how I found myself at the language school.

This is the first time I have formally studied a language since high school, where I learned French for a year and Japanese for three years. When I went to Paris for a week as a 20-year-old, that whole year of classes helped me order a croissant and a coffee and got me ridiculed by 90 percent of the French people with whom I tried to communicate. I have never been to Japan, so that language has gone to wherever things you learn in high school go that you never use in real life.

Those early encounters didn’t leave me with a burning desire to learn foreign languages. I thought about it a lot though. For a while I was going to enroll in Spanish classes. Then I decided I would go back to French. I was going to try and retrieve my Japanese from the dusty shelf of adolescent knowledge, but then I remembered Japan is really expensive to visit. Procrastination really should have been my middle name.

Being a native English speaker, it’s also very easy to get away with being lazy. With so many people in countries around the world scrambling to learn English, it’s easy to cruise through. Some expatriates live in countries for years and years without learning any of the local language. Sometimes they have their reasons. It’s hard to study on top of the demands of a job or family.

Living in a country is clearly the best way to learn and retain a language, so I decided that I wanted to make an effort while I was here. Most of my learning in Indonesian has been through cultural immersion, which means lessons from the most unlikely places — billboard ads, cinta pop lyrics, friends’ Facebook status updates or toilet cubicle doors that post badly translated signs like those that tell you not to put things in the “water closet.”

One of the things I love most about studying a language is the way it peels back the surface and reveals a whole other layer of culture. I especially love learning idioms. One of my favorites is “nasi sudah menjadi bubur” (“the rice has already become porridge”), which is roughly equivalent to the English phrase “there’s no use crying over spilled milk.” Just last week I learned “ada udang di balik batu” (“there’s a prawn behind the rock”), which means there is a hidden agenda, but for me it conjures up images of fishermen along the rocky Java coast.

Indonesian language classes have taught me more than words. I’ve also learned an important lesson: Languages are doors to entire other worlds.

I hope that by the end of my stint at language school here in Yogya, I can proudly say: “I’m almost bilingual.” That is, if you largely ignore the rules of Indonesian grammar.

Then maybe I’ll take up Spanish. But right now it’s time for my Indonesian homework.

 

Ashlee Betteridge is a freelance journalist and former Jakarta Globe copy editor.