Last year, a bunch of talented and motivated young Indonesians and Australians formed an organisation named the National Australia Indonesia Language Awards (NAILA) to foster the development of Indonesian language learning in Australia through running an annual speech competition.
I entered the Executive category of the first ever NAILA speech competition last year, and was honoured to be chosen as the winner. You can see my rerecorded speech below, kindly recorded and edited by Klirkom*.
I was very impressed by the NAILA team, and their creativity and dedication to put together an initiative like this. I also enjoyed meeting the team, and the winners of the other categories. I was particularly impressed by the fact that most of the other winners had never even been to Indonesia, yet had the diligence to learn to quite a high level. I have only ever successfully learnt languages to any degree of competence when I was surrounded by native speakers!
Entries are now open for NAILA 2016, and they have a range of categories from primary school, to executive, room for creativity, and even a new category for native speakers. If you want to test yourself, I would encourage you to apply; or pass it on to others who might. All of the information you need to apply is available at their website: www.naila.org.
As to the question posed in the title to this blog post: Is Indonesian an easy language? Well, you'll have to watch the video to find out what I think!
* If you're thinking of applying, please don't be put off by the fact that it's professionally shot! My very poorly lit winning entry was shot in my bedroom, with my daughter crashing around in the next room!