ESL Blogs

It's a rare chance for me to meet with people who want to learn my national language, Bahasa Indonesia. The language is less popular than English or Spanish. So, I won't expect to see many people want to learn it. But, I accidentally found people from various countries who are learning my national language.

They are learning to improve their writing in Bahasa. And we, Indonesians change our roles there. We become the native speakers that could correct their writing in exchange for correction on our writing as well.

Honestly, it was an awkward experience at the first time since I used to put myself in the position of a person who needed corrections, as a learner. And, when I was correcting these people's blogs, I found that they accidentally made the same mistakes. I want to share this because I'm wondering if I do the same mistakes when I'm learning English here.

1. They wrote sentences with wrong structures

I don't know how they learn Bahasa from the beginning. But, it seems they don't have that much difficulty understanding the vocabulary and grammar. But some sentences they wrote had wrong structures and missed certain things like prepositions, particle, etc. These mistakes made their sentences sounded not natural and awkward.

I think they get stuck with the structure of the language because it is something new for them. They don't know how to translate what they want to write into Bahasa. And, another problem is from my own side. As a person who has been learning this national language for more than 20 years, I'm used to reading writers play with their words and sentences in literature freely. And their sentences were not grammatically correct. And we, Indonesians, rarely really care whether we write our sentences in Bahasa correctly or not. We just write and speak it as long as it sounds good.

Well, of course in certain fields like in academic field, in journalistic and business meeting, we should be careful to follow the grammar rules as much as we could. So, sometimes I need to remind myself that these people are learning the basic ones and probably don't learn Bahasa in order to be a novelist here.

2. They chose wrong words

I found several blogs where the writers chose wrong words. And, it made the blogs funny and sometimes the mistakes were the fatal ones: gave wrong impressions. I think what happened was bad translations. A word in another language could be translated differently in a language and apparently it depends on the context.

For instance, a writer wrote in Bahasa, which the literal translation was the USA considers Bahasa Indonesia as one of languages in the world that will extinct. While actually he wanted to write that the government thinks that Bahasa Indonesia is one of critical languages or important languages.

He translated the word "critical" to Bahasa and it has different meaning here. It reminded me with one of my silly mistakes when I wrote in English. I posted it here.

So, I'm wondering if we as English learners here make the same mistakes. And, I also want to know if there are ways to minimize these mistakes, and shorten the time to learn English. What do you think?