Yogyakarta

We have finished our language training here (14 days) and I can say that it has been the mental equivalent of running a marathon.  Most days we did 4 hours ( 2 hrs in AM and 2 hrs in PM)of tutoring (just the two of us) and one hour of homework.  Sundays we had a lighter schedule of only two hours.  One day we begged off the morning class so we could visit Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world.  We were there when it opened at 6 AM and it was quite magical in the early morning light with some light fog.

We also had a couple of field trips with the language teachers.  We went to a huge traditional market which sold everything from vegetables to furniture.  We had a cooking class which I will write about in more detail in another post, and we had a trip up into the hills onto the slopes of mt. Merapi, a volcano which erupted pretty dramatically last year.  And another trip to a Hindu temple called Prambanan.  This area is famous for batik products so when we had time we shopped a bit.

So, as you can imagine, I did not have time to write for the blog, but I have a lot of material for future posts.

Here I will expound on what it is like to learn a language at my age.

I imagined my brain as a large room in which I needed to clear a large space to make room for all the new words.  So I (mentally) packed up a lot of memories, especially other languages I have learned and crammed them in closets to free up brain space for the new language.  It worked, sort of, although by the 4th day or so the space was so packed that I had to remove some words to make space for the new.  And at night while trying to sleep those new words ran around that space like squirrels frolicking in an attic.  I would wake up and think, "what is the word for airplane " or whatever.

I want to spend some time on the process because it was interesting.  We had two teachers, Ria and Ari, each doing two hours a day.  They began by asking what food and drink words we already knew and listed them on a sheet of paper, such as chicken, eggs, fruit, milk, beer, tea, etc., along with the two verbs for eat and drink.  We then learned how to make simple sentences such as:

I drink milk.

He eats chicken.

Does he drink beer?

On succeeding days we just ramped up our vocabulary and the complexity of the sentences.  It is deceptively simple but surprisingly effective.  We learned a huge number of words in the first 4 or 5 days, so that we were mentally drained every evening, but then we slowed down the vocab and worked on adverbs such as always, never, sometimes and some grammar in the sentences.  We got to the nasty stuff like irregular verbs at the very end of the course.  They have a perfectly good verb like sopir (drive) but it has another form where they drop the s and add a prefix of meny, so it becomes menyopir.  She said we can always use sopir but written material will use the longer version so we need to recognize it.  As you can tell they don't much look alike.

The other thing they did very effectively was to force us to speak and listen by asking us questions, e.g. "what did you eat for dinner?  With only two of us in the class there was no way to avoid having to answer.  One problem for me was that those words in other languages that I had packed up so tightly would burst out of that mental closet every now and then and onto my tongue.  For example die in German is "the"' while di in Indonesian means "in", so Die hotel is not the same as di hotel.  Also Indonesian does not have a word for is, or am, or are, so my brain kept trying to stick in an ist or est.

The teachers came to the hotel and we sat in a quiet corner of the lounge for the lessons.  We really enjoyed the hotel.  The main building is from 1918 and is tastefully restored with the modern guest rooms wrapping around the older building-nicely done. It is partly air-conditioned and partly open to the air.  Of course the guest rooms had AC, but there was an outdoor courtyard with a fountain.  It had a pool which I used almost every day.  We arrived on nov. 27 and when we arose on Dec. 1, the hotel was all decorated up for the holidays.  See photos.  In the Christmas tree photo, the bell person next to me was a favorite.  She always had a wonderful smile and seemed to love her job.  On my other side is one of the teachers, Ari. 

In the other picture, the lady kneeling serves up food and drinks with allegedly curative powers.  She was there every morning for breakfast and kneeled like that for 4 hours. Oh, my aching knees.  Note santa's reindeer flying over her head.

Overall I am pleasantly surprised by how much we learned.  We won't be having philosophical discussions, but we should have a few more survival skills.

I will follow up shortly with posts on the following related topics:

Visit to Borobudur

My cooking class

Visit to an agricultural station