When I moved to Indonesian to live, I realized that learning the language was important for me to be able to communicate with others without relying on my wife and daughter. I knew a little and could say things like hello, goodbye and thank you. The very basic communication. I figured I could learn how to communicate with one of the apps I always see on the tv. I soon found out it was not going to be that easy. After several months I realized the apps were only a small part of learning the language and it was time to change how I was learning the Indonesian language.
I decided to try one of the schools that I found online. It was rated as one of the best so after contacting them and taking the initial class I decided to give the school a try. Initially things seemed to be going well. I was learning the problem was that I was learning formal Indonesian and by daughter kept asking why I wasn’t learning conversational Indonesia. She would explain most people don’t talk like the way I was being taught. My biggest problem was that the school was forcing so much information at me I was struggling to keep up with their lesson plans. I tried to explain this to my teacher, but he said that he had to follow the lesson plans. At this point I started losing interest in the class which is not a good thing for a student. The school plan I purchased was an eight-week plan and if I wanted to continue, I need to have an overall comprehension score of 60. Which I was able to accomplish. Since I really wanted to learn Bahasa Indonesian and against my daughter and wife’s advice, I decided to continue with another semester even though I had started to lose interest. The second eight weeks were very bad I was not learning half the things I was being taught. I found one of my biggest problems was being able to follow along a conversation being spoken in Bahasa Indonesian. Everyone talked very fast and my capability to follow along was limited. I was losing the battle to learn Bahasa Indonesia. After the second eight weeks of class my comprehension score dropped to 56 and the school did not want to continue with my classes. Which was fine by me because I was not really learning anything.
Still determined to learn Bahasa Indonesia I had to decided what to do. Since before I retired one of the things, I did for a living was I taught people how to communicate. I decided to write my own lesson plan tailored to me specifically. My daughter is a teacher of languages and she agreed to teach me. We started by taking ten words used in ever day language and I began not only learning them but the proper way to pronounce the words. Every month we would add several new words to the list for me to learn.
