Day 13 saya dodol..

Day 13 posed a problem that I was unable to solve. The problem is that I have about 300 vocabulary words that I still have to study and Chapter 15 contained another 79 vocabulary words. The number of vocabulary words I'm having to learn in such a short period is starting to get ridiculous. This has taken a serious cut into my newspaper reading and language MP3 time...

Here's the rules for Day 13

1.       Open your newspaper or magazine and continue where you left off, highlighting and reading.

2.       After 10 minutes with the newspaper, read Chapter 15 of your course book.

3.       Write in your notebook all the vocabulary from that chapter

4.       Write on the flashcards all the vocabulary from that chapter and the newspaper

5.       Find your Idiom/Slang book (if you have it, otherwise continue with the phrasebook)

6.       Find your Language Audio files and start with lesson 8.

7.       Utilize hidden time to study flashcards

8.       Study flashcards before going to bed

Chapter 15 opened with a decently long reading section, which took up a large portion of my time, but then I turned the page to the vocabulary and found the daunting 59 listed. I skipped ahead because I thought if I read the grammar, I could come back to vocabulary when I had more time. This seemed to work out well, since the only grammar lesson today was that the me- prefix on Indonesian words meant that said word was transitive (except in very rare cases).

This has me excited. I now know that be- prefixes are Intransitive and me- words are transitive, which opens up my abilities to understand quite a bit. It also means that I can words like "ajar" and turn it into words like "belajar" (to be studied) and "mengajar" (to be actively studied). So, saya belajar bahasa indonesia (I study Indonesian) versus saya mengajar bahasa indonesia (I'm studying indonesian*with effort).

Having finished my phrasebook for all the extremely necessary things, I decided to move onto my "slang/idiom" book instead of learning seriously unnecessary things like "I'm claiming two children on my taxes" which no one ever really says anyway, to more colloquial idiomatic phrases like, "kamu dodol" (you're a coconut fudge) which means "You're an idiot." Tomorrow should be a good day with reviewing, hopefully I'll have the chance to review at least 1 half of my new vocabulary.

Good luck on your language learning, my friends.