Free Lunches, Education, and Bahasa Indonesia

In my culture, everything is commoditized. We buy a lot of bottled water here in the US for a country with clean water from the tap. We’re constantly advertised to and told we need things, and that consumerism has spread to education. It isn’t just for-profit colleges that are guilty: even a state-funded university costs too fucking much to get through without some sort of financial aid. Huge libraries and sports programs are examples of universities spending on things to increase prestige or attract students, which makes us sound more like customers than anything.

Education costs are going up even though employers are complaining about the quality of grads. Too many grads need to intern to find work at all after dumping cash into a university education, which must really feel like paying the Pied Piper. Some say our country needs to revamp education. I agree.

But if the times are a’changin’, it makes more sense for that change to start with students.To that end I’m looking for cheap, easy ways to learn Bahasa Indonesia on my own. From the wiki:

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) is the official language of Indonesia. It is a standardized register of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world. Of its large population, the number of people who speak Indonesian fluently is fast approaching 100%, making Indonesian one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.

So here’s something else commoditized: language learning. Rosetta Stone makes a software, but they’re also selling a yellow box with a DVD in it: a physical and financial sacrifice to the gods of language and travel. Some of us, myself included, need some sort of tangible commitment to make that soulless consumer part of our brain shut up. I had Rosetta Stone in the military and I hated it, so I threw some money at Pimsleur. I also bought a white board and a small phrasebook, but that’s it, I swear. I’m not trying to spend money on things other than beer.

Lucky for everyone, educational resources have become dirt cheap to free everywhere but the campus bookstore. Free resources like Anki, Babbel, and Livemocha are more than enough to get started learning a language. Forums like Reddit’s /r/languagelearning catalogue the resources and answer any other questions wikipedia can’t.

And here’s what your high school guidance counselor might not tell you: you’re gonna be poor, and you’re not going to want to buy the APA style guide for English 101. When I needed formatting help, I Googled “apa paper format” and the top result was always that Purdue website that explains it. I plead guilty to doing homework on my smartphone. I’m a vulture picking at the skeletons of primary sources, yet I’m a well-fed vulture.

To learn Bahasa Indonesia in a classroom with a teacher and a textbook, I’d have to transfer to a university. I’d have to drive about an hour every day, or move, and still shell out $700 a semester. I’d have to start giving a shit about things that aren’t learning. And I guess I don’t see the point in that.

There are no free lunches, but man does not live by bread alone.