Bahasa Go!

I will not forget that day.

I just got into junior high school. The world just started to be a little bit bigger for me. From going to my elementary school just a few blocks from home, my junior high school was like 25 minutes walk! And I was learning English for the first time! I was so excited.

But the excitement didn’t last long. I began to know how difficult this subject would be. The pronunciation is not consistent, the verbs are changing, and the change doesn’t follow a strict pattern!

I wasn’t the only one though. Every time we got our tests back, almost all of us groaned. Almost all, because there was always that one student who could get the perfect score!

So we swarmed to her desk, asking her to show her answers and explain to us what we have missed on our lessons. She would explain and explain again, but our test scores would not improve! We learned that listening to her won’t help. Of course we already gave up on our English teacher. The reason that one student was so excellent in English is because she was going to an English after school class that has native speaker teachers!

Going to such class was a luxury at that time. When Indonesia’s per capita income was only $678 (now $4,783). And of course most of the students at a public school like ours couldn’t afford to be going. Our friend knew it. And it was so kind of her to try to help us by sharing whatever she has learned there that we haven’t (and may be won’t…ever!) at school.

So that day, I was so frustrated and sitting alone at my desk far at the back. I looked at the front row and saw her back bent as she was reviewing her notes. I walked right to her and asked her,

Can you explain to me in the simplest way on how to make sentences in English?

She took out a paper, and started to write something like a math formula, an addition formula! It was something like this,

P; S+V+O, N; S+AuxV+not+V+O, A; AuxV+S+V+O?

There were sixteen of them. She said it was called tenses, it changes according to the time when the action being the topic of the sentence happens.

So finally I knew, that the change of the verb (later I knew it’s called Inflection) is due to a time factor, and also I knew later, a subject factor. I also learned of grouping words as nouns, verbs and adjectives. Other words, Parts of Speech.

So what did our English teacher teach us at class? You may wonder.

She mostly made us remember words, a lot of them! But she didn’t make clear about the nature of the language that we were learning. A language that is really different from ours; a language without tenses nor inflection!

I knew from that day on that when learning a new language, it is important to know this type of information. Does it have tenses? Does it have inflection? If it does, what kind? Do gender and number matter? And so on and so forth. And you should know it before you start jumbling yourself with vocabularies.

Then my story came to a happy ending when I could finally use those irregular verbs our English teacher made us remember. I knew which tense uses which verb, which auxiliary verb goes with each tense, how noun changes from singular to plural. In short, simple grammar rule.

So does this knowledge help me in learning Japanese and Arabic? It does. But only as much. Because then different language has different rules. While Japanese trickiest part is the Kanji characters, Arabic inflection and syntax gave me more headache!

But those will be my next story to tell.

Image by Freepik