My Love-Hate Relationship with the English Language
Ini adalah tulisan pertama saya di blog ini yang menggunakan bahasa Inggris. Tentu banyak kesalahan (saya, sebagai penutur jati bahasa Indonesia, belum merasa fasih dengan bahasa ibu. Bagaimana saya dapat fasih dalam bahasa lain?), tetapi ini merupakan eksperimen pribadi untuk merenungkan sesuatu menggunakan bahasa asing.
I have a love-hate relationship with the English language. When I was in Elementary School, I remember getting low marks for my English course. I hate everything about rules and everything about English is rules. Tenses, Simple Present Tense, and even getting to know the differences between I and My was a pain. This goes on up until I was at the middle point of my Junior High School. I was so bad and lazy with English that I was caught cheating on a homework because I was too lazy to do a simple assignment.
At that point, the internet had already matured. I certainly have more access to it than I was during Elementary School. My liking for photography and videography got me reading and watching YouTube videos of reviews, tricks, and anything to do with that. Most of them were in English. Sometimes, I have to pause the video and go to Google Translate to look up the meaning of a word. But, because of my liking for photography and videography and reading about them in English, I felt that my English was improving.
My English was improving to the point that I was one of the go-to-guy for anything English-related in my Senior High School class. One thing that I will never forget was my English teacher praised our class in front of another class and said my name as an example of why our class was better. Hearing that compliment and wanting to be like her got me to take the English major at university. Though as I realized later, an English major is majorly different than an English course, it was my High School experience that got me there.
I suddenly have a flashback when seeing the picture above. It’s about a teacher’s experience of teaching Junior High School, especially their lack of knowledge for their grade. They also complained about how teachers are not focusing on teaching but on administration work because of the new curriculum. I probably was one of those kids. I have no interest in English.
It got me thinking about how we learn a language. Learning a language first comes from our needs. Why should I learn another language if I don’t need that language? It also comes from our interest. Why should I learn about that language if I am not interested? I don’t need to learn about Russian because I have no use for it (at least for now). And even though I like BLACKPINK, I have no interest in learning Korean. Though my friend is learning Korean because they like K-pop.
I need to learn English because I need to know more about photography and videography. I am interested in English because, at that time, it was the easiest course and the only thing that was on my mind when I had to go to university. I love the English language because of what learning that language has done to my life. No, I still hate the English language. I hate the rules and how some purists on the internet have to be a grammar Nazi. Some people said, “I have no respect for this language”. I am not that extreme, but I do partly agree with that. (Why does bule have all the praise and applause when trying to speak basic, broken Indonesian, and I got bullied for trying my best to write in English?)
The teacher’s experience also got me thinking about the types of content that most people would access on the internet. My experience of learning English comes from the limited information about my hobby in Indonesian. Nowadays, I learned some video editing techniques from Indonesian YouTubers and TikTokers. Some people may think that with how easily we can access information now, we have a lot of educational content or just content in English, motivating people to know more about that language. It does not consider that with how easy it is to make content, people from any background and with their own non-English language can make content. My TikTok FYP is surely filled with Indonesian content, not English content, and that’s not a problem.
