Putting handy skills to the test
RETIRED maths educator Eric Campbell now uses his teaching skills to share his love of Indonesian.
Mr Campbell taught for a year in West Java at a teacher training college and has been learning the language “on and off” since 1958.
He has travelled to Indonesia numerous times, including several trips to Bali and a study trip to central Java in 1996.
When he retired from James Cook University, he joined Indonesian classes at the University of the Third Age ( U3A).
Mr Campbell now instructs the classes, which are held at the Aitkenvale library.
“The language itself is completely phonetic,” he said.
“Once you know the rules, any word or sentence will be pronounced the same – unlike English, which has a million exceptions and contradictions.”
Mr Campbell said the trickiest part of the language was learning the prefixes and suffixes. He said learning a language was a valuable experience for retirees.
“Learning a foreign language helps you learn our own language to some extent as well – you learn the structure of your own language better,” he said.
“If you go travelling, which a lot of older people too, it gives you the chance to converse with local people in their own language. It just broadens the holiday.”
Mr Campbell said the class members were at different levels of fluency, which “makes it a bit tricky”.
“On the day we meet, we spend 10 minutes having a chat about Indonesian news. The rest of the time is mostly reading texts and articles,” he said.
“We follow a book that in high school would be Year 10, 11, 12. One of my students, Anny, is born and bred in Indonesia, she’s married to an Australian living in Townsville.
“It’s very helpful to have a native speaker. She wants to keep her Indonesian ticking along OK.”
Mr Campbell said to master a language “you’ve really got to do it every day”.
“If anybody wanted to join, they would need a bit of background and knowledge,” he said. “If we got a whole lot of people who didn’t know much at all, we’d have to start a second class.”