Such a period of struggling with a new language is especially good for training oneself to be seriously comparative, because there is not yet any automatic translation of foreign words into the language in your head. You gradually get to know enough to notice more, and yet you are still an outsider. If you then stay on long enough, things get taken for granted again, as they were back home, and you tend to be much less curious and observant than before – you start to say to yourself: 'I know Indonesia inside out.' The point being that good comparisons often come from the experience of strangeness and absences.

"Frameworks of Comparison" (2016)