Who Knew Australians Could Speak Javanese Like This! – A Play In Bahasa Jawa

Sri Ngilang or The Disappearance of Sri, is a play by George Quinn, and performed by students of The Australian National University. Many Indonesians are used to hearing foreigners speak Bahasa Indonesia, but it’s a different story for Javanese.

Javanese has the 10th highest number of first-language speakers in the world (over 84 million), just behind Japanese. But as a second language, Javanese is notoriously difficult to master.

According to George Quinn, learning the nuances of ‘respect usage’ is invariably the most difficult feature of the language for foreign learners to understand. Dr. Quinn suggests that this problem can most effectively be addressed through drama-based strategies, an approach that has scarcely featured at all in Javanese tuition programs to date.

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Sri Ngilang (“The Disappearance of Sri”) – A play in Javanese by George Quinn. Presented by students of Javanese at the Australian National University (Canberra 2014). Produced by the Digital Learning Project
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/digital…
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2015 and has been updated.