Hi, I’m Guntur, a full-time PhD student at UNSW Sydney, Australia. My research is mostly about blockchain and IoT. I am also with Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia.Multilingualism
I was pretty lucky that when I lived in Japan I got such opportunity to take an english class with a native speaker as the teacher. Yes, the teacher was directly brought from US.
I forgot what the class name was, it’s something that would be like Advanced English Speaking Class. That class was carried out in the spring break if I’m not mistaken. Both Japanese student and foreign student are able to join this class, but there is a limitation that the total students are not more that 10 persons. All the students taking this class were came from different field of study.
The class went well, although we were forced to make a report everyday and conduct a presentation before the class begins. We knew that all of those severe efforts are for our sake.
Eventually, there was an epic quote that I like best from Professor South, my native english teacher:
In this globalization era, a person who is capable to speak in two languages is called bilingual person, three languages is trilingual person, and so forth. But for just one language, it is called AMERICAN.
Yeah, americans are lucky (or unlucky) since they just had to do nothing if they’re about to go abroad. Their native language is the international language of this universe!