Languages, Mario
In which I am not a polyglot
My last post on video games had a somewhat wider readership beyond the usuals, including mutuals on X and Substack followers. A new follower quoted the opening line, “I am an Asian man, therefore, I love video games.” A commenter was disgusted with the commas before and after ‘therefore’ and rightly so. The original draft had the sentence without any commas.
What happened? Grammarly. I was recommended to install the tool for work requirements, and found that I could blame any grammatical mistakes on the tool. So here I’m blaming Grammarly again. It’s Grammarly that changed the first paragraph according to its wisdom, before it was out of free recommendations and left me to the readers’ mercy, apart from typos, redundancy, and wrong prepositions, which it still corrected.
I have written in English for more than 30 years and still struggle with grammar every day. By this stage of life, however, I cannot trade English for any other language, including Indonesian. And how I tried.
The Boy Wonder Who Didn’t Know the Difference Between Is and Are
I learned English from television, from American sitcoms and cartoons. Both Indonesian and Malaysian televisions, the latter caught through a satellite dish, didn’t have dubbing but Indonesian and Malay subtitles, and that was how I learned Malay too, a cousin language to Indonesian (I’ll get into the ‘Bahasa’ business in a minute). Then, through my parents’ novels, non-fiction books, and the “Learn English” section of children's magazines.
The rude awakening came at the first English test of Year 7, simple present tense. I must have missed the key to differentiate “is” and “are”, and was among half of the class who got a C or less. I fixed my English in a year, while also learning Indonesian and the local language, Sundanese. Nobody could ever master Sundanese, since very few Sundanese went to Christian schools by the 1990s.
I don’t know if, in general, English is taken as a more girly subject compared to science, because the best English students by Year 8 were girls. Our Asian, our Chinese way of learning, approached the grammar rules as a mathematical formula. While this approach was also handy for me, I learned to love English by living in the language day and night, textbook and TV.
Therefore, while the girls made fewer grammar mistakes than I, I became the master of spelling. To this day, the “Typos abound” in bio sounds strange to me, especially when it comes from Anglophone nationals.
By high school, I had excelled in English, History, Civics, Catholic Studies, and Indonesian, too. And yet I had the reputation of being dumb because I did badly with what mattered: Sciences and Accounting. I wanted to specialize in Languages for Year 12, where I would study English literature as well as French and a third language, German or Japanese.
And yet the school allocated our specialization stream, and I was included in the Social Sciences stream to learn Politics, Anthropology, and Econometrics. That’s because the teachers knew that the Languages stream wasn’t for aspiring novelists, but for aspiring hoteliers. It had the most brutal boys who played American football INSIDE the class, and the most tomboy girls who might have learned to smoke. Their field trip was to Bali to take a picture with a snake and white people in swimsuits, while my trip was to the Stock Exchange. The Science losers stayed to redo their AP Math, lol.
Then I loved my reputation as a boy wonder at both the IELTS (TOEFL but British) and the English as a Second Language program in Melbourne. Everyone was much older and had college experiences. During a cultural presentation, the Mexican student presented tequila, and naturally, the instructor made sure I didn’t get any (I still have never tasted tequila, and I still get the Asian flush).
Like a boy wonder meeting reality in the major league, I was rejected from the Professional Writing program because they were just aware, post-acceptance, that I wasn’t from a Commonwealth country. They never had non-Anglophone students before and worried I couldn’t cope (the quality of my sample short story might not help either). Then it's off to Communication & Media for me, which means now I’m having decent media literacy.
Speaking English remains a challenge to me. Too often, the Aussies must say, “What was that?”, “Can you repeat that?” and so on. But nobody ever thought I was dumb, and I learned that the Australian-born teens also had their accents – Vietnamese and Chinese who spoke like Southern Californians. Turks and Greeks who spoke with a Mediterranean tinge. Japanese who smiled and nodded more than completing sentences. The rest of the world can be proud of the fact that they speak English better than the Japanese, and it seems still the case on X.
In Year 12, I took a French course to accompany a friend from the Language stream (I also helped with his Indonesian and English book reports) and found myself the only Chinese in the class. I still love reading the sentences and found my spoken form understandable even for the French. The teacher did say that Sundanese speakers had the skill to speak French fluently – both languages use the ‘eu’ sound a lot as well as tonal vocals.
I lived near Melbourne’s Little Italy and considered studying Italian at the Italian Cultural Institute (now in a new location). I was an Italophile in the 1990s – the soccer, the Renaissance, and the food. But sadly, for the Cultural Institute, by 20, I had become a Japanophile thanks to anime. The anime club had members taking Japanese class, and as my International Relations major, there were Australian students taking diploma classes in French or Spanish. I could have been the only IR student taking a diploma in an Asian language, but it cost more money, so an extra language class.
Bahasa and Other Languages
Now, into the ‘Bahasa’ bit while it’s still relevant. The word means ‘language’ and still gets in the way of racial and nationality politics in Singapore and Malaysia. A website or manual in Malaysia is usually available in English or Bahasa Melayu, Malay.
The language is also a national language in Singapore, and this is where it gets tricky. I think if one uses flags as the indicator of the language, the Malay option in Singapore can use the Singaporean flag, as it’s often presented with the Malaysian flag in Malaysia. But everyone is awkward with it, as I found when Malay Malaysians weren’t impressed when I talked Malay to them. They weren’t very fond of a Chinese person speaking Malay, maybe like it’s a Jew speaking Arabic or something.
Indonesia is not supposed to have this problem, but some people, be it Australians, Malaysians, or Indonesians themselves, came to use “Bahasa” to mean the Indonesian language, even when that word is unnecessary. Maybe “Indonesian” isn’t exotic enough for some Australians. Maybe the Malaysians and Indonesians want to match it to the Singaporean/Malaysian logic, along with the fact that, unlike in Malaysia and Singapore, the native tongue of Chinese Indonesians is Indonesian, and we’re practically illiterate in Chinese.
Returning to Indonesia, I knew that being an English teacher was a very possible career option. Not my priority, but could be fun, and most of my English teachers were cool. Unfortunately, a modern English course requires plenty of creativity and games, and I was bad at designing games. Well, just see where this twee approach to pedagogy, and probably government, gets Britain today.
Ironically, when I eventually became an English teacher, I was known as the most relaxed and chilled one. Perhaps I just didn’t want any trouble with the kids and conserved my energy, or I’m indeed a chill person by Chinese people’s standards.
Ending This with Duolingo and the Like
I studied European languages in the second half of the 2010s for two reasons. The Scandi trend and a Catholic pilgrimage to southern Europe with my parents. I bought Lonely Planet pocket phrasebooks of Spanish (Latin American, the European one out of stock), French, and Italian. I downloaded Duolingo and a couple of other apps, Drops, and Memrise (Memrise has videos of native speakers saying the sentences).
I did well with Spanish and French, but not sure why Italian never sticks with me. The z? The contractions, at least as I saw it? Very ironic that eventually I enjoyed Spain and Spanish in every regard better than Italy and Italian.
Then, for some reason, I became a devoted Swedish learner. Perhaps I picked Sweden for the solo trip because its currency is cheaper than the Euro. Perhaps because while trying the language on Duolingo, I found it easier to learn than Dutch and German. And especially than Danish. Nobody could speak Danish, not even my German-speaking aunt.
In the late 2010s, I got into the Nordic Twitter and happily replied and quoted in Swedish and Norwegian. It did well for my career, and I was featured in The Local Sweden. I applied for some jobs in Sweden and had the former Swedish ambassador to Indonesia following me.
Then the 2020s. Pandemic. Duolingo got that fugly makeover (I hate those human characters). I became a heterodox. My new X mutuals were Americans and Britons, and some of the Swedes and other Europeans actively unfollowed me before I unfollowed them. Especially after uh Christmas 2023.
Now and then, I still see something in Swedish and still enjoy teasing my brain in figuring out the sentence and grammar before checking with Google Translate. Finding a heterodox or center-right Nordic is never easy, so it’s always good to find one, and now it even applies to Asians, too.
But now I socialize with mostly North Americans and British, and Australians, so English is good enough. Even if I’d keep making grammar and tenses mistakes, which is not a mystery for any student of Indonesian: It’s a language with minimal, maybe non-existent tenses.
If AI could change my life, maybe it would do so by making my sentences free of grammar errors, including from its overcorrection. But will it do so while maintaining my wit and humor? Many grammar checkers dislike my frequent use of actually, certainly, of course, and also my ‘and also’s.