Keren! Indonesian I

By IAN J. WHITE

Sydney: Longman, 2002. Indonesian Course Book 1. Pp. ix, 214. Colour illustrations and photographs. Indonesian Activity Book 1. Pp. iv, 139. Illustrations and photographs. Indonesian Teacher's Book 1. Pp. xx, 124, Maps, illustrations and photographs. Keren I on CD.

Despite the new title, Keren is actually a revision of the best-selling Indonesian textbook Bahasa Tetanggaku by the same author. With 190,000 copies sold since its first appearance in 1994, Bahasa Tetanggaku has successfully established itself as the standard Indonesian textbook in Australian high schools. Keren too is mainly designed for the Australian market, as the material was written to meet local curriculum requirements and features Australian and Indonesian characters.

Both course and activity books are arranged in seven topics featuring a young Australian girl named Nicky, her family, her friends in her Indonesian class in Australia, and people in Indonesia with whom she has developed friendships. Nicky's parents live in Jakarta, where her father works for a mining company. Nicky is in boarding school in Australia, but travels to Indonesia to be with her family for part of each year. Each topic of this course begins with a cartoon comic strip dialogue featuring Nicky, her friends and family. This approach is especially appealing to the younger learner, but even more mature students will appreciate the colourful look of the book.

Although very similar to its predecessor, Keren is certainly the better product offering a range of improvements. It is accompanied by a very useful Teacher's Book containing excellent resources, suggestions of teaching strategies, supplementary activities, teaching plans and even a Listening Test CD. The topics of both course and activity book are also available on CD-ROM, thus enabling students to conveniently jump with the click of a button from the course book to the matching page in the activity book. From this Adobe Acrobat file the student can launch separate applications to activate the sound for the dialogues, as well as another new feature called the Interactive Indonesian extension activities. The latter is a valuable improvement providing many activities ranging from traditional multiple-choice questions to drag-and-drop activities, games, quizzes and even a facility to record one's own voice and compare it with that of a native speaker. Another improvement is the excellent interactive Website that is far more appealing and comprehensive than any other Indonesian language Internet site.

However, there are some problems with the series. It is a bit disturbing that the range of possible answers in the interactive exercises on both CD and Internet is often very

limited. When the student is prompted to ask an Indonesian woman for the location of her house, the programme will only accept one answer. It can be frustrating for the student who has just learned that the position of subject and predicate in Indonesian can often be swapped to have that the perfectly correct sentence 'Rumah Ibu Elli di mana?' ('Where is Mrs. Elli's house?') dismissed as wrong. The only answer accepted by the program is 'Di mana rumah Ibu Elli?’, and even the common variant 'Di mana rumahnya Ibu Elli?' is not accepted.

Every topic contains well-balanced speaking, reading, listening and writing activities, but for the older learner in particular it does not provide enough information on grammar. Students are constantly confronted with structures that are not explained, and when explanations are given, they are often oversimplified. An example is the author's explanation of the plural: 'When it comes to making nouns plural, Indonesian must be the easiest language in the world. There's no need to think about adding "s" or dropping "y" and adding "ies" Just say the word twice!' (Course Book 1, p. 73) The student is further reminded that obvious plurals are not indicated by reduplication ('I brush my teeth' -'Saya gosok gigi') and that the reduplication should also be dropped when a plural indicator such as banyak (much, many) is added. The example given - namely that anak-anak is the plural of anak (child), and that one must use banyak anak and not banyak anak-anak - not only is wrong but also shows how superficially grammar is treated. The student is further confused when the structure that has just been presented as incorrect is used only two chapters later, with 'banyak toko-toko' used for many shops' (Activity Book 1, p. 87).

While the author emphasises authenticity, which is laudable, many of the voice recordings are 'authentic' in that the voices of the Australian characters are spoken by Australians who have the tendency to pronounce mid-vowels as dipthongs; ‘kota’ (city), for instance, is time and again pronounced as ‘kouta’ More care could have been used in teaching young Australians how to correctly pronounce words before they were recorded. I also found it rather unconvincing that 'Michelle dari Perancls' (Michelle from France) speaks Indonesian with a heavy Australian accent.

It is also all too obvious that the author of Keren is not only not a native speaker, but not even a near-native speaker. The language of the dialogues is sort of a hybrid between formal and informal style, which does not help students to distinguish clearly between the two modes of speech. Some colloquialisms are used in the dialogues including keren (cool) - which, however, almost always appears in inappropriate contexts. The most essential words, such as ndak and nggak (the colloquial variants of tidak, 'no', 'not'), are completely missing and only the formal form is used. Also, at least a few of the many particles that pepper the speech of Indonesians such as sih, lho, nih, tuh, toh, deh, and dong could have been introduced in the dialogues.

There are only a few obvious mistakes in Keren 1, but it is disturbing that these mistakes were not corrected in the transition from Bahasa Tetanggaku. It is annoying to see that, after so many years of wrong use in Bahasa Tetanggaku, a mistake as blatant as the translation of gagah (sturdily built) as 'handsome' (which is always ganteng) has not been corrected. 'Saya kurang pasti' is still used when they actually want to say 'saya kurang yakin'('I'm not quite sure'). Pandai and pintar ('bright' or 'capable' versus 'skilled') are confused, a doctor's praxis becomes kantor dokter (doctor's office), 'sour' is translated as pahit (bitter), and the subtle difference between tolong and bantu ('help' versus 'assist') is ignored, to mention only a few of the far too numerous examples. Although it must be acknowledged that the language of Keren has slightly improved when compared to Bahasa Tetanggaku, the persistence of a large number of cases in which the speech just doesn't sound native but more like an Australian's Indonesian is one of the text's weakest points, along with the lack of attention to structures.

On the other hand, Keren has improved what was already a well laid-out and fun-to-use textbook for the Indonesian language with stimulating visual presentations and a true multimedia approach. It can only be hoped that the author and the publisher will have a better look at the text before launching Stages 2 and 3, which are scheduled for publication in September 2002 and in September 2003.

ULI KOZOK

University of Hawai’i at Manoa