“Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?” Gloria from Modern family

Welcome to my brain dump, it's morning and when I can sit down, sipping a cup of coffee while contemplating life and emptying it out a little.

Today's topic basically is all about my latest experience in speaking a language I should have been fluent in.

Have you ever tried speaking in front of a crowd but it’s not that you’re nervous but needs to think about the language or messaging?

My brain isn’t exactly like deeplr or google translate that can translate within split seconds. It took me a while to actually translate something from English to what supposedly my native language, Bahasa Indonesia.

But sometimes you’ve got to actually think fast and that was the mistake I did yesterday because I was saying things like “hold on” and panicking because my brain can’t translate what messaging I needed to convey from English to Indonesian.

This is a story of how I always felt like, I’ve always been living in between.

I tried my hardest to blend in with everyone around me as much as sometimes its a challenge. I get by with regular conversation as I’ve learned mirroring, but my monologue, the way I think and how I spend the rest of my 24/7 aren’t exactly conversing in Bahasa. Even majority of my education were often conducted in English or some other languages than Bahasa Indonesia.

My own mom even struggled to communicate with me over simple things like pots and pans, names of the veggies in the local language or over recipes that I know by heart in English but not quite in Indonesian. It’s just like that shows Modern family when Gloria gets frustrated as people underestimate her intelligence because she speaks English with accent. It’s actually the same with me but it’s more like with Indonesian.

I spent quite a few years speaking in front of a crowd but never an Indonesian one. So, that has to do with the way I understand most things. My friend has a way of saying that “ it’s my temporary Indonesian mode” and anyone who has been conversing with me would know best that I actually convey things that of matter of importance in English rather than Indonesian because there were words that I didn’t know and best to be conveyed in a language that I understand.

Sometimes I am afraid of people thinking that I was a show off but the fact is that, I don’t know how else to speak it. Was I always been this way? Certainly not but it had to do about something happened a decade ago that literally altered the way my brain works and the language that I woke up with. I found it strange but there were cases like mine, like that guy who woke up from coma and was able to speak fluent mandarin.

My case was like that where my inner monologue were so much fluent in English than Bahasa Indonesia and long ago, I talked about how I learned Indonesian again just by slowly going out and rehearsing how to converse in Indonesian. It’s been a constant re-learning for me and I am getting really good at it.

I think mirroring is also the best way to learn a language. This is something that I am teaching in my class too that basically just watch various shows in our preferred language or one that has to do with our expertise. That way when we encounter the similar conversation, we'd know what to say/do and learn the lingo of the said language.

At the same time, I started reading more works in Bahasa indonesia too that helped with my comprehension. I suppose that's all for today's brain dump. I need to expand on the topic that I was dumping here the other day.

See y'all around!