Choosing the Right Register for a Host Family Email
You are staying with a host family in Yogyakarta for three weeks as part of your HSC Indonesian Beginners course. Your host mother, Ibu Sari, has just sent you a short message asking whether you want to join the family for a trip to Borobudur on Saturday. She writes informally, using 'kamu' and short sentences, and ends with 'Kabari ya!' You want to reply by email. You know the trip leaves at 5 a.m., that you have a school excursion the night before, and that you are unsure whether you will be back in time. You also want to thank her and ask whether you can bring a friend from your Indonesian class. Your teacher has reminded you that emails to host families should be polite but not stiff, and that 'Anda' would feel distant here. You have 120-150 words to write the email.
1. Decide whether to address Ibu Sari as 'kamu', 'Anda', or 'Ibu', and justify your choice in terms of the relationship and the medium.
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Use Ibu in direct address and kamu-style familiarity is not appropriate from a guest to a host mother. The safest choice is to open with 'Ibu Sari yang baik' or 'Halo Ibu' and to refer to her as 'Ibu' throughout. 'Anda' is grammatically polite but socially distant and would sound cold in a family email, especially after she used 'kamu'. Using 'kamu' back would be too familiar for a student-guest relationship. So the register is: polite forms (Ibu, terima kasih banyak, mohon maaf) with warm, simple sentences. This matches the medium: email to a host family is semi-formal, not a school essay and not a text to a peer.
2. Draft the body of the email in Indonesian, covering the 5 a.m. departure, your prior commitment, your uncertainty, your thanks, and the friend request.
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A model body: 'Terima kasih banyak atas ajakannya. Saya sangat senang diajak ke Borobudur. Namun, hari Jumat malam saya ada acara sekolah dan mungkin selesai larut. Karena berangkat pukul lima pagi, saya belum yakin bisa ikut. Apakah boleh saya memberi kabar pada hari Jumat sore? Saya juga ingin bertanya, apakah boleh saya mengajak teman saya dari kelas bahasa Indonesia? Terima kasih, Ibu.' Notice the moves: thanks first, then the constraint, then a concrete time to confirm, then the request. 'Apakah boleh' is the polite request frame; 'belum yakin' expresses uncertainty without refusing. The 5 a.m. detail is linked to the Friday-night problem so the reader sees the reasoning, not just a vague 'mungkin tidak bisa'.
3. Explain one language choice that would make the email sound rude or too casual, and one that would make it sound unnatural.
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Rude/too casual: opening with 'Halo, aku mau ikut' or answering 'Nggak bisa, sorry' would be blunt and would ignore the social debt of being hosted. 'Aku' to a host mother is overfamiliar. Unnatural: writing 'Saya akan menghadiri kegiatan sekolah pada malam hari Jumat dan saya tidak dapat memastikan kehadiran saya' is textbook-formal and sounds like a letter from an office. The exam rewards control of register, so the best answers combine simple grammar with polite markers (mohon maaf, terima kasih banyak, apakah boleh) rather than long complex sentences.