This may be a surprising observation, but the No. 1 easiest language for native English speakers to learn as a second language may not be Spanish, or French (normally considered similar to English due to their romance language roots), but many consider that distinction to go to Indonesian, a language with the exact same alphabet and a much more simplified grammatical structure. The one thing that has always been a roadblock for learning language for me and I'm sure others, is the conjugation of verbs.... so many different tenses, so many different ways to express a similar meaning: future, present, present participle, present progressive, etc., etc., it can make one's head numb learning all the rules, especially when you realize native speakers don't even need to figure it all out, it's intuitive. Chinese doesn't have so many tenses as just putting extra words around verbs to indicate their tense, and Indonesian follows a similar principle: just keep the verb as it is, and add dressing around it to indicate which tense it is. I think all languages should do that instead of the Japanese-Korean-Spanish-French way. Anyway, Indonesian is pretty cool, and it uses the word "guru" for teacher, which makes a lot of sense and which I appreciate as the namesake for this blog.
I don't have any particular interest in Indonesia and didn't know much about it before I started delving into the language a little bit, I knew its capital was Jakarta and that its language is actually spoken by quite a few people (it's like the 5th most used language in the world), and I vaguely heard about a dictator named Suharto that ruled the nation with an iron fist. I actually had to look up where Indonesia was on a map. I feel like a pretty ignorant American. I can count all the non-American countries I've ever been to on 2 hands, which is not a lot considering I was born in a different country. I've been pretty isolated I guess, and didn't do any study abroad programs in college, and haven't been to 2 prominent continents that many do go to: South America and Africa. It's been pretty educational and engaging to learn about other cultures while learning their language: If I get anything out of all of the language learning I've been doing in the last several years, at least I have that broadening of horizons to fall back on.
As the old Chinese proverb goes, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the journey of learning a thousand (more like tens of thousands of words) of a language begins with a single word. I remember first picking up a Japanese dictionary or looking at a page of all Korean Hangul and just being completely overwhelmed, but it really is laying brick by brick, like a wall (unfortunately for President Trump, his wall apparently is not made out of brick and can be drilled through easily).
Similarly, a blog of a thousand posts begins with a single word! This blog's 1000th entry is coming up! (Blog anniversary!) But more importantly, I inspired my wife MJ to start a blog as well! Maybe that's the magic of writing, it's contagious! It's a stress relief, a recording of feelings, and an exercise in grammar all in one! I can look at a picture of past events and it can say a thousand words, but I don't necessarily remember exactly how I felt during the day without a blog. I hope MJ gets as much value out of her own blog as I do this one.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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