Saya suka Indomie: Learning Indonesian. Also working on French & German.

[Deinonysus]

While the bbc article is interesting and describes some real challenges/interesting features that Indonesian learners meet ie diglossia and mixing in of local dialects I am not sure about the explanation offered as to why this happened - that is I don’t think it happens because Bahasa Indonesia is overly simple or rigid and has a small vocabulary - rather I think the mixing of dialects happens because people usually learn their dialect first, are proud of and comfortable with their dialect and its idioms and because they may actually not have had much education and school is where people learn BI. Many Indonesians have not been to high school and quite a few not graduated primary school so it’s understandable that their dialect is more comfortable for them. As for colloquial language, Bahasa Gaul, it actually seems even grammatically simpler to me than BI. Of course you have to learn some extra vocabulary and alternative grammar and it is often spoken more rapidly and less clearly than standard BI.

Disclaimer: I’m not an academic and this is just my reading of it - it’s just that the bbc article seems to be heading in the direction of the common Indonesian myths ie. Indonesian is a constructed or simplified language. And i think much of this article is really looking for an explanation for that common language learning syndrome - making the transition from classroom learning to street language. Sure, dialects are part of the challenge but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with a “lacking” in BI. Axon, who has spent more time there recently than me can offer an opinion.

Additional thought: Singlish (colloquial Singaporean English) is peppered with vocabulary and grammar from Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese and other languages/dialects and I don’t think that is due to simplicity, rigidity or lack of vocabulary in English - just more to do with heritage.

Got it, thank you for adding perspective to the article. I'm new to Bahasa Indonesia so there's a lot to take in! This article was one of the top results when I searched for "Indonesia" on Reddit's r/languagelearning

[Xenops]

I don't know how useful this might be, considering I know no Indonesian, but it is one of the most well-represented languages on FictionPress.com, and I'm almost certain that there will be lots more informal, everyday language in those stories. There will probably be a lot more spelling and grammar mistakes, too, so maybe something to keep in mind for later, when you have a stronger base.

Webtoons, specifically Tower of God, has fan translations into Indonesian, and I imagine other popular comics are translated as well. Webtoons has a large readership in Indonesia.

[Deinonysus]

Thanks for the recommendations, Elania and Xenops!

I got the okay from the German professor to audit the class! I'm so excited! I haven't taken an actual language class since I was in college over a decade ago, and that was well before I took up the language learning hobby. If these Intermediate German classes can get me to the point where I can read Die unendlische Geschichte (the Neverending Story), I will be so happy!

I'll mostly hold off on Hebrew until I'm done with Indonesian because I really don't ever like learning two languages at the beginner level at once, let alone while I'm also taking an intermediate class in a third foreign language and consuming media in a fourth. The only exception will be that I'll work on Pimsleur Hebrew between finishing the first 10 lessons of Indonesian and getting the full course from the library. I've already done the first level of Pimsleur Hebrew so it will be review.

I'm hoping to finish the Indonesian Duolingo tree within the next couple of months. I might keep working on it after I've started to ramp up Hebrew. Since Duolingo Hebrew uses no vowels and has no audio except for full sentences (since it has no way of knowing how to pronounce isolated words with no vowels), I am considering it to be more of an intermediate resource than a true beginner resource.

I'm doing my due diligence as a Beta tester and reporting a lot of sentences in the Indonesian course. There are a lot of unnatural English sentences, and there are a lot of answers they don't accept but they should (mostly formal vs informal pronouns). But I think that for a product that was just released in Beta, it's pretty solid.

Going through the Duolingo Indonesian tree is a very different experience from the Danish tree. Because Danish's vocabulary was so transparent, I could just race through the tree and average hundreds of XP a day. With Indonesian, I'm deliberately trying to take it slow so all of the new vocabulary sinks in. I've been trying to do crown levels 1 and 2 within a day or so to reinforce new vocabulary, and I've gotten some skills up to level 3 as well.

To be honest, I didn't think that the grammar of a natural language could get any easier than Danish (at least for an English speaker), but so far Indonesian wins. Danish syntax is closer to English but it has a bit more inflection and two genders.

[Deinonysus]

In Indonesian, you seem to be able to use a word as almost any part of speech without modifying it. This seems to work the same as in English when we verb a noun, so it's crazy intuitive. The main problem is just learning all of the vocabulary. I've been relying on mnemonics, such as:

Indonesian word	Meaning	Mnemonic
kembali	Come back, return	Come back to Bali!
enter	masuk	I enter ma sook!
keluar	go out	go out to get some kaluah!
tinggal	to live	being alive feels tingly
silakan	please (when offering)	Please accept this silicon.
selesai	to finish	Did you finish selling SI?
tahu	to know	Tofu knows,
lupa	to forget	and the wolf forgets,
ingat	to remember	but the ingot remembers.

[edit: "tahu" means "to know" but it also means "tofu". Thanks to Adrianslont for pointing out that I had misspelled it "tohu"!]

Ich habe das Buch für meinen Deutsche Sprachkurs von Amazon gekauft! Es soll am Donnerstag ankommen.

[Adrianslont]

In Indonesian, you seem to be able to use a word as almost any part of speech without modifying it. This seems to work the same as in English when we verb a noun, so it's crazy intuitive.

Just tell me to shut up if I am “helping” too much but that is only true sometimes, especially in more formal language. There is a bunch of affixes that do the job of changing part of speech: me, ber, ke, le, ter, -an, -i and so on. They may be apparent in some of the duolingo already - I haven’t looked at that yet.

Also, you’ve got a typo or misspelling in your verb list - the word for “to know” is “tahu”, which incidentally is also the Indonesian word for tofu! I guess you knew that when you made your mnemonic! Going back to the parts of speech, the noun form “knowledge” is pengetahuan - I’ve never heard anyone use tahu as a noun.

I’m currently in Europe facing different language challenges and the only Indonesian I’m doing is anki reviews and reading your log! I’m enjoying your enthusiasm.

[Deinonysus]

In Indonesian, you seem to be able to use a word as almost any part of speech without modifying it. This seems to work the same as in English when we verb a noun, so it's crazy intuitive.

Just tell me to shut up if I am “helping” too much but that is only true sometimes, especially in more formal language. There is a bunch of affixes that do the job of changing part of speech: me, ber, ke, le, ter, -an, -i and so on. They may be apparent in some of the duolingo already - I haven’t looked at that yet.

Also, you’ve got a typo or misspelling in your verb list - the word for “to know” is “tahu”, which incidentally is also the Indonesian word for tofu! I guess you knew that when you made your mnemonic! Going back to the parts of speech, the noun form “knowledge” is pengetahuan - I’ve never heard anyone use tahu as a noun.

I’m currently in Europe facing different language challenges and the only Indonesian I’m doing is anki reviews and reading your log! I’m enjoying your enthusiasm.

Not at all, thanks for keeping me honest! It's very helpful to have the input of more experienced learners.

I think it's easy for me to jump to conclusions with Indonesian because even though I'm an absolute beginner, I don't feel like it because it's so intuitive. I haven't needed to repeat any Pimsleur lessons yet, while I probably had to repeat almost every lesson in Japanese and Korean because on top of the new vocabulary there were a lot of long formal phrases with grammar I couldn't quite parse yet.

I think that Duolingo is mostly sticking to the analytic parts of the grammar in the beginning, and I haven't really gotten to the agglutinative parts, but I do see them further down the tree. A lot of the skills name the affixes you listed explicitly, with names like "Ber-verbs", "di-", "-an", and "ter-".

[Deinonysus]

With most languages on Duolingo I find that higher Crown Levels take more energy than lower levels, because the number of lessons increases with each level after the second. However, I find the opposite to be true with Bahasa Indonesia. Because most of my energy in a new skill is spent learning vocabulary and coming up with mnemonics, I go through the first couple of levels very slowly, but once I start getting the vocabulary into my brain it goes much quicker.

Rather than using a separate SRS system to keep track of vocabulary, I've just been writing down my mnemonics in a text editor or spreadsheet. Once I have seen the word a few times, the mnemonic generally sticks, so I don't think it's worth, say, curating an Anki deck on top of my Duolingo time.

I thought it was interesting that there are separate forms of "goodbye" depending on who is leaving, you or the person you're speaking with:
Selamat jalan - safe travels (lit. safe road)
Selamat tinggal - safe stay

(there are a million other ways to say goodbye in Bahasa Indonesia as well and it's a bit overwhelming to be honest)

Xhosa also has this distinction, and I would guess that Zulu does too because they're so close. "Hamba kakuhle" means "go well", and "sala kakuhle" means "stay well".

[Deinonysus]

The vocabulary is finally starting to sink in, with the help of plenty of weird mnemonics. I'm working on getting the 11 skills before the first checkpoint up to crown level 3. I have 5 more skills to go (they're at level 2). After that, I want to loop back and get them all to level 4 before starting in on the next checkpoint with 13 skills. I'm already close to 10% of the maximum crown level after just a week, so I think I should be able to get through the entire tree within a couple of months. I'm hoping that's enough to get me to comfortably skim news articles and maybe children's books.

Last night I watched an interview between Dr. Arguelles and a Javanese English teacher. He asked her about the similarities between Indonesian and Javanese, the ease of learning Indonesian, and the state of Indonesian literature. I'll have to catch the rest of his series of interviews about Southeast Asian languages. He also has one on Malay (I think he means Malaysian Malay vs Indonesian Malay, but I'll need to watch the video to be sure), and one about Tagalog and Cebuano which I've heard have some similarities to Malay. Here is the video on Indonesian and Javanese:


I think that most people reading this log are pretty familiar with the languages of Indonesia, but for those that aren't, I'll summarize that Bahasa Indonesia is the lingua franca of Indonesia but most speakers know it as a second language. The two largest native languages in Indonesia are Javanese and Sundanese. Like Bahasa Indonesia, they are members of the Malay-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. In addition to Malay, Tagalog, and many other island languages of Southeast Asia, the Malay-Polynesian branch also contains Hawaiian and Māori, and many other languages of the Pacific. I'd be very interested to see if I can understand any Hawaiian or Māori once my level of Indonesian is a bit higher!

Malagasy, which is spoken in Madagascar, is also an Austronesian language but is not a member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch. Yes, that Madagascar. Just off the Eastern coast of Africa. The one with the Lemurs. According to the Google, the distance between Madagascar and Hawaii is 17,475 kilometers (that's over 10,000 miles if you prefer Freedom Units). That's probably further apart than any two points in Eurasia! So until Europe started colonizing the world, I think it's a safe bet that the Austronesian language family held the record for widest geographical spread.

[Deinonysus]

I've made pretty good progress in Duolingo this weekend! I don't remember what level I was at on Friday, but I'm level 10 now, making Indonesian my 5th highest XP language. I'll probably overtake German soon but that's because I reset it recently. I have almost everything up to the first checkpoint up to level 4, so I should be working on the second checkpoint within the next day or two. There's a lot of of important vocabulary to learn, including colors, numbers, time, family, and a couple of new affixes. Once I reach the second checkpoint, I'll be around a third of the way through with the tree. It's a very short course so far, just six screens tall with my current resolution. Some of the longer courses are ten screens or more.

I have five more Pimsleur lessons on hand. If I run out before the full course comes, I think I'll do a bit of Pimsleur Hebrew, but I'm not really working on Hebrew at the moment. Once I feel like I'm ready to move on from this Indonesian side quest, I'll give it my full attention (or at least as full as I can give while taking a German class, working full time, and being a married homeowner).

As usual, I'm trying to watch France24 in French every morning and check Le Monde fairly often. I've also started trying to consume more German media in preparation for my class. Unfortunately I can't stream DW live in the US, but I can watch prerecorded clips and I watched a bit of the news show Der Tag.

This is unrelated to languages, but I started running again. I enjoy it but I always have a hard time working it into my routine. I ran about a mile and a half. I wasn't running the entire time, because I prefer to run barefoot so I had to slow down or just walk if there was too much debris.

I also played the piano a bit today, which I haven't done in a while. I should have been practicing all summer. I'm starting up lessons soon.

I already have languages build in to my routine pretty well, so if I can add in a little bit of daily piano practice and running a few times a week, I'll be in good shape!

[Deinonysus]

Still making good progress with Indonesian Duolingo! I've gotten around 1/6 of the way through the tree in two weeks, so if I can keep up this rate I'll have everything completely golden by November. That's a bit more of a time commitment than I was planning on and my choices are to overlap with Hebrew and be studying three languages at once (including the German class I'll be taking), or to delay Hebrew. I'm not really sure which I would prefer. I guess I'll have to play it by ear.

Unfortunately my library had an issue getting me Pimsleur Indonesian. It's expensive but I think I might just buy the MP3s from Pimsleur. I could try again with the library but I don't want to leave a big gap between lessons while I'm at such an early stage. It's a good product and it's worth supporting them.

I subscribed to r/Indonesia on Reddit but I'm not able to understand more than a few words here or there yet. There is a decent amount of English and a lot of pictures posted, so I've been able to ascertain that there are a lot of posts about the Asian Games, and there seems to be a meme war with r/Malaysia. I've also been taking a look at Kompas.id, the website of a major Indonesian newspaper. Again, I'm only getting a couple of words in any given sentence, but I think that's to be expected after two weeks of study. It feels like I've been studying for longer and I need to keep reminding myself.