Salam kenalan (Glad to make your acquaintance)...

Apa kabar? Kenken kabare? 안녕하세요. 잘 지내세요?

Hi, my name's Ed, and I'm currently a grad student of linguistics based in San Diego (at the moment). I was born and raised here, so naturally I'm a native English speaker, but my parents came from the Philippines, so I also grew up hearing Tagalog and a little bit of Ilokano (my father's language). However, I'm not able to speak them at this point. I've been interested in learning different languages, particularly those that are off the beaten track. Instead of joining my fellow junior high and high school students in their Spanish classes, I took French. And I studied Japanese a couple years before that (that was the first foreign language I studied). I've also managed to study Korean for about a year.

Learning languages is not my only passion, however. For over 15 years, I've been studying, performing, and teaching Balinese and Central Javanese music and dance, studying with many renowned teachers both here in the US and in Indonesia. This, of course, naturally progressed into an interest in learning the languages associated with these performing art traditions. You can see some of my performances here. And you can see one of the groups I've recently performed with here.

Over the years, I've become fluent in Indonesian, and I've been doing a lot of research on Balinese, so most of my posts will be on these two languages. My hope for this blog is to provide some useful and/or interesting tidbits of knowledge I've gained from learning both Indonesian and Balinese (along with the occasional posts about the other languages I've studied) and to be able to share them with a larger audience.

Let me close by saying:

Inggih, ngampurayang titiang duaning makeh iwang titiang. Mogi-mogi ida dane sareng sami sida dados ledang kemanten sareng pikolih niki.

Ya, tolong ampuni saya karena kesalahan saya banyak. Semoga Anda kalian bisa menjadi puas dengan akibat ini.

[Yes, please forgive me for making a number of mistakes. I hope that you are all satisfied with the results.]

Sampai jumpa lagi! (Until we meet again!)