About one month ago I’ve signed up for a free A1 Indonesian course organized by the Indonesian embassy in Vienna. I thought “it’s free, and it’s A1, so it won’t be too hard”. So for the past weeks every Friday I was joining the Zoom classes with our bubbly and energetic teacher Ardhana.
Since I’m used to learning “my way”, I was still trying to apply my methods with Indonesian, for example concentrating only on high-frequency words, inserting all the words in Memrise etc. To be honest, I am pretty busy with Chinese Mandarin (which I study every day), so I was not very consistent with Indonesian, often doing the homework at the last moment and not revising the words regularly. And then something happened and my motivation changed completely. Yesterday Ardhana casually told us “by the way guys, next week we’ll have a test and you will need to know this, this and this”. It was at this moment that I realized that I will need to grind the Indonesian this week in order to pass, haha 🙂
While I agree with most of the contents of what we have to learn, I really don’t agree with the necessity to memorize all the colors, and how to describe a person. How often in daily speech do you need to say “he has curly hair” or “her skin is dark” or “her nose is long” or “her face is round” or my personal favourite “she has slanted eyes”. In my humble opinion, I would almost never need this in order to have a conversation, but we have to follow the course. I guess I will need to learn it all anyway for the test, but still, I don’t think it’s super useful.