The brain is an amazing thing

In highschool, I studied Indonesian for 6 years, doing 3-unit HSC indo in year 12 (that’s probably ‘extension’ in today’s parlance, if it’s even offered). That was 1998.

Since then, I’ve barely used it at all. We spent a year at church with some Indonesians, at Unichurch UNSW, but I didn’t really say anything at all. I listened to some conversations, at least the ones that weren’t in a local dialect (like Javanese, for example), and could sometimes make out the general gist. I tried to understand the occasional song at church. I was never that good at listening skills in Indo anyway.

But today, I went to the blog of Andrew Buchanan. He’s a Christian Missionary in Indonesia, teaching at a Bible college in Toraja, on the island of Sulawesi. The blog is in Indo… and the surprising thing is that I could read most of it. There were a few words that didn’t make any sense to me (some are, perhaps, ‘technical’ Christian jargon?), and a bunch of others that I recognised as knowing once-upon-a-time, but in general I could understand what he was writing about.

This is my brain understanding a language that I essentially haven’t used in 9 1/2 years, a brain that has had to learn 3 other (completely different) languages since.

Whoa.

[image link: http://arapehlivanian.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/homer-brain.jpg]