She Said What?

Language learning is a messy business, lots of fun but makes you very prone to falling quite royally on your face, usually sprawled before a fine and rather large audience. Especially in the beginning when you’re trying your hardest to get your tongue and brain around the new sounds, wanting to recreate that which you’ve just heard or read, of course those first tries are usually dreadful, so far removed from the original that either you’re not understood, or the person or persons at whom you’re directing them burst into fits of laughter. This could be because your pronunciation is really shocking, you’ve said a completely different word due to your mispronunciation or you've got your fledgling vocabulary mixed up. One such story that has stuck in my mind was whilst teaching in Java, a teacher got the words celana and jendela mixed up. Celana means trousers and jendela means window. So there he was in front of his class, mainly teenagers and a fair few of them girls, and he decides to speak in Indonesian, not really sure why as he was teaching English and usually in our line of work we don’t use the native language in class, anyhow he asks in his most polite Indonesian whether he could open his trousers. I can see now the looks on his students’ faces, and the laughter that would have echoed throughout. Possibly a great example of how to get your students not to care if they make mistakes and just have a go. 

My own even more embarrassing story was when I had first arrived and I mean had just got off the plane in Java and arrived at my shared house. The first person that I met was our maid, she was tiny with the most beautiful features and sixteen years old. As a teacher over there you make enough by local standards to afford a live-in housekeeper. Desperate to make a good impression and horribly uncomfortable with the idea of having a maid, I wanted to be as kind as possible to her and show her respect. I had no knowledge of Indonesian at all when I arrived, so there I was meeting this adorable girl, a lot more humane than some of the teachers I was about to encounter and I asked her name in English at which she replied Apa.  Gosh I thought that’s an easy name to remember. That weekend I tried my best to communicate with young Apa when she wasn’t tied up with her work which some of my housemates unashamedly abused, I spent time with her and the dictionary. It was going along swimmingly, throwing about Apa this and Apa that, the only odd thing was every time I said her name she repeated it back to me but I just thought I must be pronouncing it incorrectly so I would conscientiously repeat it back to her, sometimes this exchange could go on for a while. 

I decided to do a little sight seeing but the guide book didn’t offer up much in the way of places, however the zoo certainly popped up and a friend of mine back in the UK had suggested I go. I managed to get across to Apa where I wanted to go and got her to understand that I’d like her to go with me. We got into a rust eaten, sweltering, rank Zebra taxi, and off we went to Surabaya Zoo. The first thing that hit was that it was heaving and everyone stopped to stare and I mean everyone.  What is important to tell here is that in Surabaya foreigners are a rare breed, and are a source of much entertainment. Forget the animals Apa and I were the main attraction. We did our best to move through the gawping crowds but smiling or saying hello in response to all the calls of “Hello mister!” was pretty exhausting. Finally we stopped in front of the monkey cage, the poor beasts, well all the poor animals, the zoo itself was one of the most distressing places I’ve ever been, most of the animals showed extreme signs of stress but that is another story for a different day. There we were in front of the monkey cage, me with my nose in the dictionary trying to piece together a sentence or two to speak to Apa, when some of the intrigued masses were brave enough to come over and speak to us. They asked us our names, of course they asked Apa in Indonesian and she replied Liz, I did a double take as I thought maybe I’d misunderstood their question. The group we were talking to spoke a little English so I said that her name was Apa, where they duly all started laughing but kindly informed me that her name was Liz and that apa means ‘What” in Indonesian. At that point the embarrassment rushed straight to my already red and sweaty face and flowed through every part of my body. No wonder we were having these ridiculous exchanges of me shouting “Apa” and Liz replying “apa” and me saying “Apa” and her retorting, well you get the picture. What on earth she thought I hate to think but of course she was nothing but lovely to me.