Entry 2

  It has been the first week that I have tried to learn Malay. I thought learning this language would be so complicated that I would find it even difficult to begin. Yet, with the help of Youtube channels and my Malaysian classmate, I was able to learn the basic greetings in Malay. The greetings include "good morning" as "selamat pagi", "good afternoon" as "selamat petang", "goodnight" as "selamat malam", "thank you" as "terima kasih", "sorry" as "minta maaf", "keep it up" as "semangat", "how are you" as "apa khabar" and "I am fine" as "khabar baik". Though Malay is a whole new language for me, I can still figure out some grammatical patterns by studying those sentences for greetings. I even felt like I am learning a brand new version of English. That might be based on the identical characters used and similar pronunciation. After I took two courses regarding linguistics last year, I have begun to notice the pattern of a language in order to figure out certain meaning for certain words. Therefore, it is even more interesting while learning a new language now. Despite the similarities, there were still a few obstacles for me during the process. For example, I had to learn to be familiar with those words. Those alphabets might be the same but once they were put in totally different orders, it seemed difficult for me to understand. For all these years that I have learned English, I have accommodated to the rules of English. Yet, Malay contained its own rules of word orders like "selamat pagi". It was a bit confused for me. After I looked at more and more Malay, I became a little bit more familiar with its word orders. 

  Apart from learning the greetings, I have tried to find different channels or website teaching Malay. Surprisingly, the result was not very positive. There were not many directly Malay-teaching channels or web pages. I thought it was such a shame that the result turns out to be in this way. After a while, I found some youtube channels that teach you word by word so I started watching them. Nevertheless, it occured to me that this type of channels were not that useful and I cannot remember the words efficiently. Then, I recalled dropping down the principles and actions of learning a language in class including focusing on getting the meaning first before you get the words, "direct connection" to mental images, copying the face, etc. Hence, I watched some funny Malay videos and applied some of those principles and actions at the same time. As a result, I can learn Malay so much faster than merely watching some directly teaching video. I suddenly remember something happened in the past. When I was younger and still struggling with remembering the English word "chocolate", my parents played me a movie named "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Ever since I have watched that movie, I have remembered the correct expression of this delicious sweet in English. Since then, I have been using this method to learn English. This proved the usefulness of these methods so I decided to keep on using them to learn different languages. I cannot wait to learn more about Malay by using the methods.