OK, I'm half-way through my two-week intensive course, and I'm still far from fluent.

In fact, the Indonesian language-learning bit of my brain is currently divided into two.

The first part is a lumber-room. Here is piled, in big, wobbly, disordered heaps, a vast quantity of half-learnt words and expressions. They've mostly been gathered from my reading, and their volume enables me to now read pretty well. But they are very hard to access when needed actively. Because they've been stored badly, some of them have become bent and distorted (meaning that when you reach, for example, for the word "earring" you get the word "dog"). Many have been separated from the friends they need to go around with.

The second part of my language-learning brain is much, much smaller. It is nicely organized, and a neat, slightly prissy librarian can always locate the word that's needed -- if it's there, which it mostly isn't.

My problem is how to shift stuff from the lumber-room to the library, without messing up the library, or dropping it all in the no-man's-land of the corridor, or doing my back in, as it were.

I'm actually surprised that this frustrating removal process is taking so ludicrously long. Surely I should be better BY NOW??

Let's get a few unhelpful suggestions out of the way first:

"You're a rubbish language-learner."

Not true. I have a good track record of learning languages.

"But Indonesian is such an easy language, so you really MUST be a rubbish language-learner."

Usually people are too polite to add that second part, but that's where they're going with the comment, it seems... I completely disagree with this one. True, I'd have a much bigger learning task ahead of me if I was tackling Chinese or Arabic. But I don't actually believe in "easy languages". There are subtleties in every language, because human beings live subtle existences. In Indonesian there are certainly subtleties that are very hard to master (affixes being one enormous example of these). And the vocabulary is vast, partly because the language has burrowed into lots and lots of other languages and taken away what it thought was useful. Sometimes, when you encounter the umpty-umpth synonym for something, you think you must be learning at least three languages...

"You're too old."

I will treat that with the disdain it deserves... But of course that nasty, hissy little idea does wiggle its way into my consciousness on bad-performance days.

OK, does anyone have anything more useful?

"You've not had enough time."

Well, that's true, to a degree. I had a long time to absorb the subtleties of German and French. The former, especially, benefited from long periods in Germany with really very few responsibilities other than to learn German. Currently, my working day unfolds in English, and I haven't even had regular Indonesian lessons for a while. But I have had time, remember, to fill up the lumber-room... There must be a question of technique here, as well as time. If I don't have much time, I need to learn in a smarter fashion...

"There isn't much in the way of materials for post-beginners in Indonesian."

This is actually very significant, I feel. My current teachers have to cobble together materials to suit my needs. To save paper, often they're photocopied on the back of English exercises (the school also -- mainly, even -- teaches English). These graded, guided, upper-intermediate English exercises are exactly what I need in Indonesian... It's just too hard to go from reading and understanding something to expressing an opinion on it. I need lots of steps in between. I need to practise sentence patterns, work out alternative ways to phrase things, work on manipulating sentences, and repeat, repeat, repeat. And there are, it seems, few sources of such material at the upper-intermediate level. There's a massive gap in the market here, people. Anyone want to fill it?

Meanwhile, in the short term, any suggestions on sorting out that lumber-room will be very welcome.