My wonderful teaching assistant, Ruri from Bengkulu, made me aware that The Indonesian Way (TIW) no longer shows a link to the Quizlet flashcards. Apparently the links “dropped” in the process of restructuring TIW.
Then I found out, that besides for TIW, there are also Quizlet cards for AnekaBaca and BacaYuk!, our learning materials for intermediate Indonesian,
According to Wikipedia, “Quizlet is a mobile and web-based study application that allows students to study information via learning tools and games. It is currently used by 2-in-3 high school students and 1-in-3 college students in the United States”.
The flashcards for Indonesian Online were not made by the IO team, but by users. While I have linked to Quizlet on the sidebar of TIW, the links are only to the eight modules of TIW, but if you go into Quizlet, you will discover that there are also flashcards for every single lesson.
The flashcards were made by more than one Indonesian language learner, and some flashcards also contain entire sentences. One of the most prolific Quizleter for TIW also made flashcards for AnekaBaca and for BacaYuk!. They are not easy to find, at least not through the search function, but when you click on the link for Gordon Jenkins – his Avatar is a turtle – then you can see the flashcards for AnekaBaca and BacaYuk!.
Unfortunately, BacaYuk! was spelled BakaYuk! And if you are a native speaker of English, it may be useful to you, that Gordon added a spelling guide. So for the word ‘puluhan’, his pronunciation guide is ‘POO.loo.han’ where the capital letters indicate that this is the syllable that is emphasised. Unfortunately Gordon did not use the IPA transcription, which is not only universal (for non-native speakers of English, the pronunciation guide is rather confusing), but also far more accurate.
Gordon also created useful vocabulary subsets. For instance, there is one that contains 89 Indonesian words for “emotions, feelings and personality”. This is very useful, but again, be careful with the pronunciation guide. For percaya, the pronunciation is given as “p’r.CHA.ya”.
So go, and check Quizlet out. Besides Gordon, there are dozens of other users who have created subsets of TIW. I like, for instance, Kate Heffernan’s Passive and Active Voice exercises. They are taken from lesson 94, which, unfortunately, is not mentioned.
Whenever you deal with Quizlet or other application with user-generated content, you need to be aware that the content isn’t always up-to-date or otherwise reliable. As nice as the Quizlet vocabulary cards for The Indonesian Way are, they are based on a previous version of TIW, and do not reflect the current content.
Another minor thing that I don’t like about Quizlet is that it does have an option to listen to the vocabulary word—but only of the English translation. This surprises me because Quizlet says that it supports Indonesian among the 18 supported languages.
Honolulu, 06/02/2019
Leave a Comment