just wonging.

Having come to Jakarta almost every other weekend over the past year, I have managed to garner enough vocabulary to exchange a few pleasantries with Grab drivers and order food at restaurants. But the process of properly retaining the language has not been the smoothest one, with the usual joys and frustrations one encounters when picking up a new language. Ending a lighter week on Bahasa-learning, I reflect on a few observations over the course of this process. 1. “Bahasa is an easy language” This is an oft-heard comment in the Indonesian archipelago and Malayan Peninsula, usually by foreigners who have not mastered the language. “It has no grammar” is also not an uncommon addition to the above comment. The language does offer the appearance of being easy:  it uses the latin alphabet, and for a large portion of the world’s population this means saving the need to learn a new writing system It does not utilize tenses like usual Indo-European languages do, hence a verb will have no ...

I was in Lusaka early February, just finishing my westward land journey that began from Mozambique. After the brief stay in the Zambian capital, I would venture northbound to Rwanda on a flight. I had spent the morning in Kabata Cultural Village, 40 minutes by foot south of downtown (story for another time). At quarter past noon I boarded a northbound minibus to Independence Avenue, where I hopped off and speed walked the remaining 3km of distance through Cairo Road. Cairo Road is the bustling downtown of Lusaka, its center of trade. Vendors of all sorts lay out their goods on the street side for passersby, mostly business people or fonctionnaires from nearby office buildings. The road was lined with skyscrapers of 30-40 stories with a yellowish tone (somewhat resembling its namesake Cairo), each were owned by large state or private enterprises offering professional services, or hotels that looked like they were built from decades ago. On the other side of these buildings were the...