“The Secret Relationship between Sumbawa and English”

The story about my experience in learning English

I would begin this writing by that possessing curiosity, motivation, perseverance, and belief are my secret of strength in learning English all these times. Being curios is the start to be knowledgable which automatically lead us to have good motivation and being persevering. Believe me or not, such a positif belief will hit us afterwards.

Once I read a journal which stated, “curiosity does play an important role in learning” and “curiosity, a state of arousal involving exploratory behavior, leads to thinking and thinking culminates in learning.” (Hill, M. E. And McGinnis, J. 2007). That means by having curiosity, it enables me to be an autonomous learner due to being impatient. I have experienced that kind of impatient. It happened when I was young, as an Elementary School student, to be honest, I was sick and did hate English so much. I had no idea, but I was just thinking that why should I learn another language while even my own language has not been mastered well, and what it is used for.

However, those bad thoughts and such negative feelings could be disappeared after being curious of what were the real answers of my questions and figuring out whether my assumptions were right or not. It made me surprised and convinced me that English is not just a language but it has such an outstanding history between English and Sumbawa. I found numerous incredible things and it was beyond my expectation that I would be able to learn not only English, but also history of West Sumbawa. During learning and researching, I figured out that Sumbawa Language in some way were taken from English. For instance, “No” in Sumbawa Language has lots of meaning and its own style to address it but principally those are used for negative sentences.

a.       ‘Nom’              : I don’t

b.      ‘Nok roa’         : I don’t want

c.       ‘No ti’              : It’s ok (for certain questions)

d.      ‘Nonya’           : Nothing

e.       ‘Nongka’         : No

f.       ‘Nompoka’      : Not yet

From six words above, it can be seen that the basic word of those words is ‘no’ which is used to address refusion and negative sentence.

The other examples of this amazing discovery of my curiosity regarding to the Sumbawa words that were taken from English could be found in certain words, such as:

a.       ‘Longga’ (taken from ‘long’)  : (adj.) the height of someone

b.      ‘Rango big’                             : (adj.) the size of someone

In this case, those words are both adjective, yet the use of them is not similar to the meaning of English. In English, ‘long’ is used for the length of something, meanwhile in Sumbawa, ‘longga’ is addressed for height of someone. Likewise, ‘big’ in English is used for the size of both something and someone is still acceptable, yet in Sumbawa, ‘rango big’ is intended to those who are fat. These examples are acknowledged by Sumbawa people.

At the end, after getting know those words, it was like amazing and amusing at the same time because I seriously never expected I would learn so much about English and the history of the Language of Sumbawa. That was all started from being curious which made me having positive attitude and motivation towards learning English in depth and I finally possess belief of learning which never make me get bored during learning English. Therefore, be curious and suprising things and never expected will come to make you gain good motivation, attitude, perseverance, and firm belief in learning any languages.