The difference between my language and yours

I have always been a quite observant throughout my entire life. I like to know how people think, how relationships going, and reflect them to me.
I am quite easy to imitate accent and the way locals live (in Tawian).
Days go by, I am more interested in the uniqueness of community.
I tried to not generalized everything, but every time I gained new insight; I understand why do people come to general conclusion.

Like English, my native language - Bahasa- is a lingua franca , means, I do have native native language which is not official, e.g. Javanese. Grew up as Javanese and living in the most populous island in the world, makes my Bahasa has a really strong Javan' accent. People from other islands will directly recognize me as Javanese once I opened my mouth. Yet, it was also easy for me to spot another Bahasa spoken from someone outside Java.

Many Bahasa vocabs are also derived from Javanese as well. It made me mistakenly interchange formal Bahasa and Javanese. It happened to English, as the world's lingua franca, it tends to replace Bahasa in daily communication.

Singaporean and Malaysians will understand this, where each of their native language gets broken since most of them are also lingua franca and they are overlap with each other.

While English has complicated grammars, such as past, present and future. Bahasa revolves in "now-time" always. For example:

In English: I went to a coffee shop after the concert finished.
or I will go to coffee shop after the concert finished.
which have different meaning!

In Bahasa I will likely say the same sentence to those two different English sentence: saya pergi ke toko kopi setelah pulang dari konser.
However, I would put "a time context" to make my statement clear, for example:

In Bahasa: KEMARIN saya pergi ke toko kopi setelah pulang dari konser
or
Saya AKAN pergi ke toko kopi setelah pulang dari konser.

See?

My point is, sometimes, English requires unnecessary grammar to express easy context. However, Indonesian tends to make mistakes (so do I) in sentence which requires gender, possessive, modals, and time information.

In Malaysia, we commonly heard Manglish or Malaysian broken English, however, mostly everyone can understand the context despite its lacked grammar.


B: you will watch cinema with me, can or cannot? -> this is English, but with Malaysian context!

Even I already struggled with grammatical errors, yet I made it still. Does not count the difficulty of some pronunciations. For example, Indonesian doesn't have the sound of E like in a "CAT". We tend to pronounce "cat" like "pet".
It is difficult to make our tongue relaxed for "sh" in "finiSH", so does strong D which is hard to eliminate.
These things are not just happened in English but also in Bahasa, whereas both language are lingua franca (our native but not really ours).


Take example of another language!
My boyfriend and I are speaking English for daily communication. How does he perceive English is different than I do.
One day, I told him:

"Baby, we will be together eventually. Don't worry!"

then he got angry and said, "I don't like the word 'eventually'" which was on that time I didn't understand that he perceived different context.

I meant it to say (In Bahasa): sayang kita akan bersama pada akhirnya! Jangan khawatir!"
Which  translated explicitly in English, it could be:
"Baby we will to be together (certainly at the end)! Don't worry!"

But.... he didn't get it.

It turns out that English word "eventually" has similarity with German word "eventuell" which means "perhaps" or "maybe"
ta da........

There were also other errors such as:

machen words which actually means nothing, but the world insist it should be equal to English translation of "make".
So, at the moment I am so get used to with my boyfriend's unnecessary "make".

For example: "I make myself dinner" ; "I make myself dinner" which is actually "I am making dinner by myself" or he just made dinner and he is eating at the moment. However, none of us are English native and I won't bother to be a grammar police since no language is perfect, but context is important.

To overcome our differences, I tend to concern more in our context rather than our sayings. We often changes vocabs to our more familiar vocabulary.
I will say "piramida" instead of English "pyramid"
or I will say "paprika" instead of "bell pepper"

Since we both knew it, why bother to point each other nose for unnecessary grammar?

These are our language and after all, our communication skill is not linearly related to the language mediocre.
So, next time when someone correct my English... I would gladly ask what is his/her native and let see if that person also make infringement mistakes as we do.