I’m still waiting for the results from the test, but all I can say – it really helped my motivation! The pressure to not “lose face” really pushed me to study vocab. Previously I was just listening to the Zoom classes without really trying that hard because my main focus was Chinese, but because of the test my priorities and focus shifted. I thought this sudden burst of motivation would disappear right after the test, but it’s still there (at least for now).
Now Indonesian doesn’t seem as alien to me as few weeks back. My current vocab is about 100 words (according to Memrise). I just did a review session where I got only 5 words wrong out of 70 and some of them were just spelling mistakes, so I’m pretty content with the progress. I still don’t enjoy learning using the “traditional” method though. In our last class we were learning how to say what hour it is. For a whole hour. I don’t think that it’s something that is frequently used in daily speech and what we should be focusing on in order to start speaking Indonesian. But that’s not my curriculum and it’s a free course provided by the embassy so I guess I should stop complaining and just do some self-study in my own time if I want to learn my way.
I also realised that I need to change my mindset of “I can only study one language at a time” to “I can study 2 languages simultaneously”. In the past, I only did one at a time, so now it is a totally new challenge for me. I would try to get really immersed in the language, listen to it all the time, watch TV shows, read books, chat with native speakers. But how do I do that with 2 languages?
I went to Youtube for additional motivation and watched few videos by Lindie Botes to get some inspiration on how to study several languages at the same time. Funnily enough, in her last video she talks about failing her plan to study 12 languages this year and that it’s totally okay because we are not robots, we are living in a pandemic and our motivation and moods fluctuate. I really related with that. While watching her video I also thought that it would be cool to learn Tagalog some day (I guess it’s the influence of Lindie combined with the big Filipino Tiktokers, Navarose and Bella Poarch). But I really should stop hoarding languages, because after Chinese I want to have a go at Japanese and French :)))