Many readers of Oranghongkong.com or my own Indonesian friends have questioned how long I have been in Indonesia before I started school. The answer is about 6 months. While waiting for the new semester to start, a brother in Surabaya helped my mother find a private Indonesian tutor who also understood Chinese. In Indonesia, it is very difficult to find a teacher who understands Cantonese at the same time.

The Indonesian private tutor comes from the big Medan in Surabaya

My first impression was that the tutor was young and beautiful. He is an ethnic Chinese who was born in the city of Medan but grew up in Surabaya. It turned out that the teacher was fierce, even fiercer than my grandmother in Hong Kong. However, this teacher was fierce for my good and wanted me to understand Indonesian as much as possible before entering school; on the contrary, my grandmother was fierce because it was to protect her own good name.

My sister almost cried every time there was a private Indonesian lesson at home

The tutor came to the house almost every day, and private tutoring usually lasted approximately 3 hours. My younger sister, who was 3 years old at the time, also had to take private tutoring and cried almost every time because the private tutor was so fierce. Whenever the domestic workers at home brought us drinks, my sister would always hug them while crying.

Learn from "a i u e o"

At that time, we had to learn Indonesian starting from "a i u e o". It is different from countries such as Japan and Korea, where they have been taught a similar pronunciation to Indonesia since childhood, namely "a i u e o". However, Hong Kongers learn how to pronounce Cantonese by memorizing words, and when I was a child, learning English was also based on memorizing words. This is one of the reasons why Japanese and Koreans learn Indonesian much faster than Hong Kongers.

At first, it was very difficult for me to master "a i u e o" and so on, let alone other combinations such as "ba bi bu be bo", "ca ci cu ce co" and so on. To really master the basics of Indonesian pronunciation, it took me a few months.

This private tutor has a very important role in learning Indonesian because she instilled a strong foundation of Indonesian for me. But unfortunately, we have lost contact with the private tutor. If he sees this article, I would like to say a big thank you to him.

Decided to look for a local school that uses Indonesian

After a few months of learning Indonesian at home with a private tutor, my mother and aunt started looking for a school for me. At first they intended to enroll me in an international school in Jakarta such as Jakarta Intercultural School (JIS), but in the end they decided to find me a local school that used Indonesian as the language of instruction.

In the next article, I will tell you how the process of finding a school turned out to be not as smooth as we imagined.