MSI Press Blog

  Six weeks before a short-term assignment in Indonesia, I dutifully opened Duolingo and began working through the Bahasa Indonesia course. It was slow. Painfully slow. And the sentences — “my cat drinks milk,” “I see the bread on the table” — felt like linguistic postcards from nowhere. I kept wondering when, exactly, I would need to announce the dairy preferences of a hypothetical cat. Still, I persisted. I arrived in Indonesia with a handful of phrases and a vague sense of the language’s rhythm. And then something happened that no app had prepared me for: I needed Indonesian immediately. A small complication at the airport. A hotel check‑in with no English. A first dinner out with my American colleague — at a lovely, inexpensive local restaurant where the staff spoke only Indonesian. A winding walk home through unfamiliar streets. Without Indonesian, we would not have eaten. We would not have found our way back. We would not have been able to function. The next day, as we were b...

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from My 20th Language by Betty Lou Leaver, Ph.D. -- Introduction In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a polyglot—although I have formally and informally studied twenty languages, the most recent being Indonesian, which I undertook over a three-week period at the age of seventy-four. After this intensive study, I spent four weeks in Indonesia conducting faculty development in English for limited English speakers at a government institution. During my time there, I found myself needing Indonesian in countless practical situations: communicating with drivers, navigating train stations between Bandung and Jakarta, checking into hotels, and—perhaps most memorably—combining various nouns with "tidak berfungsi" (does not work) when dealing with hotel staff in Bandung. I helped my co-teacher order at restaurants, asked for directions (or more typically, how to get back to where I started, given my exceptional directional challenges),...

Aging is not a footnote in my linguistic life—it’s the headline. In my seventh decade, I’ve noticed the shifts: slower retrieval, occasional delays, the need to kick out inappropriate words from other languages before the right one surfaces. But I’ve also noticed something else: the scaffolding holds . The foundation of more than a dozen languages, decades of professional memory work, and a lifetime of linguistic adaptation still supports new acquisition—even when the brain is 73 years old. 🧠 Memory Challenges and Multilingual Compensation Yes, recall is harder now. I feel the delay when I’m not in the right cultural context. I sometimes reach for a word and find three others from unrelated languages elbowing their way forward. But I also know how to filter, sort, and retrieve , because I’ve done it for decades. My memory banks are full—not just with vocabulary, but with patterns, structures, and strategies . That’s what makes new learning possible. 🌍 The Indonesian Challenge Lat...