Tripping with G and Y

So I just finished my first week of Indonesian class and I am very excited. I’ve always wanted to learn another language, and spending seven hours a day in class I think I’ll get a little bit further in my comprehension then I did in high school French. Indonesian wasn’t exactly my first choice but it’s certainly better than getting Pashtu or Farsi or Arabic. I’ve discovered that learning another language can be frustrating at times, especially early on. Our teacher is a native Indonesian; her English is good, but sometimes she’s a little hard to understand. She’ll try to explain something and not infrequently I’ll look at the other guys in my class and see that the bewildered look on my face matches the one on theirs. Usually the light bulb will go off in someone’s head and they’ll explain it back to her in English we can all understand and she’ll get excited and say “ya, ya, bagus (good). I relieve the tension by coming up with phrases that make me laugh.
Teacher: Halo James, Apa kabar (hi how are you)
Me: Saya sangat persajarah (I am very hysterical)
Teacher: Oh Mengapa? (Why?)
Me: Saya minum susu bisa (I drank poison milk)
She always gives me this look like don’t be stupid. She’ll ask us to make up our own sentences so I write,
Raket-raket itu adalah reproduksi (Those racquets are reproducing)
Or
Mereka makan sepeda merah (They ate the red bicycle)

As I mentioned our teacher is a native of Indonesia, Jawa to be exact. She goes off on tangents a lot which leaves us all scratching our heads. She thinks I look like Sean Penn which is a new one for me. I think she wants me to go dancing with her; there is a zero percent chance that this will happen.

Indonesian is actually a pretty easy language to learn. Unlike English its words are actually pronounced phonetically. For instance it has five vowels, and they all have one pronunciation. “o” will always be pronounced like the o in “boat.” In English we have long and short vowel pronunciations and about a million variations of these. “Bad” “ball” “a” are all short but they are pronounced differently. If you’re trying to learn English you’d be like
“How do I know which inflection to use?”
“I don’t know you just do.”
“???” (???=bewilderment)
Studying Indonesian this past week has shown me just how jacked up our own language is. It’s kind of like Chinese: if you didn’t grow up speaking it good luck trying to learn it later in life.

Take the letter C for example. Why do we have this letter? What exactly does C have to offer that isn’t already covered by K and S. Car would be the same as kar, city would be the same as sity. It only looks weird because we’re not used to it. How do I know if C is a K or S sound? Well there’s more rules, but there’s also exceptions to those rules you just kind of have to know.

G is another flagrant offender. It has two different sounds and sometimes it’s silent ???
Game, gym; totally different. Why don’t we just use J? What is so wrong with J? Gym; there’s a phonetic phelony. How did we get this word? I think G and Y were hopped up on crack cocaine and capped J and I. “G.Y.M. it’s pronounced Jim, what are you looking at?” No one had the intestinal fortitude to stand up and say “No, this is wrong; G.Y.M. does not say Jim.” And silent G ??? If it’s silent why is it in there? Sign: it’s like G snuck in the backdoor and posed for the family picture. Two months later the family gets there portrait back and there’s some stranger standing in the back.
“Who is this guy?”
“I don’t know I thought he was one of your relatives?”
“I don’t know him?”
“How’d he get in there?”
It becomes a family legend, the stranger in the back of the photo who isn’t supposed to be there.
Oh and let’s not forget when G sounds like F. Rough ??? We just accept this because it’s what we were taught. This was probably a practical joke gone horribly wrong, probably perpetrated by the French.
“Hey let’s throw some random letters together and tell the English it’s pronounced “Ruf.”
We believed them, and they’re still laughing at us.

Y is another good example of how jacked up our language is. It’s like the catch all letter.
“Hey we don’t really have any other letters to use?”
“Uh just throw a Y in there.”
How else do you explain syrup, why, whey, way (pronounced the same as whey ???), gym, yellow, many, eye, etc.

Anyway all that to say Indonesian in comparison is a very easy language to learn, of course with any language it takes time and practice. Even still I think the world would be a lot less complicated if everyone just spoke English.