Musim Panas

Greetings from Mona, a.k.a. buncis manis,

This morning, I grabbed a stack of 200 flash cards and shoved them against my forehead, hoping that a slot would magically open and accept the download. When the attempt was unsuccessful, I made a cup of coffee and attacked the stack the old-fashioned way, feeling the poignant crackle of my wrist popping with each new word. In linguistic school, I was taught that this is the worst way to learn a language. Unfortunately, I happen to be a tactile learner with mild social anxiety. So three years in, James (an outgoing, auditory learner), is yacking away with everyone he sees and I'm left staring blankly, mouth agape.

Not long ago, I thought I would never achieve fluency in a second language. But I've made it my summer project to become conversationally fluent, and am approching it systematically. So all over our house are stacks of little blue cards, and when I go out, I carry a pen and my little notebook with the picture of Jesus on the cover.

Two nights ago, I met the grandmother of some of my students. When she and her husband retired 8 years ago, they moved to Turkey. She had never learned a language before, but she began to conquer Turkish, one of the more difficult languages in the world. Now she's handling it just fine. She said that they have a saying in Turkish which means "Never give up." Well, we have a saying in Indonesian "sedikit, sedikit," which means "little by little." One little blue card at a time.