~~~Why Indonesian?~~~
1: Indonesia
I have been fascinated with Indonesia for a long time. I love gamelan music, which inspired a lot of 20th century classical music, from Debussy to the Minimalist movement. I was lucky enough to attend a Javanese gamelan concert a couple of months ago and it was absolutely fantastic! It's a very different listening experience from most other music. You don't really listen for individual notes or quick changes, you just let the music wash over you and notice it slowly evolving (which is also basically how Minimalist music is suposed to work).
I also love the wildlife. Indonesia is home to the asian apes: the orangutan (a bastardization of the Indonesian "orang hutan", or "forest person") and gibbons. And the island of Komodo is famously home to the world's largest lizard.
And the vistas! Jungles and volcanoes and beaches and islands! And the coffee! The islands of Java and Sumatra are synonymous with it. Visiting Indonesia is absolutely on my bucket list.
2: Ease of learning
But I am fascinated with a lot of languages and cultures. What makes Indonesian stand out is that it is also famously easy for foreigners to learn, due to its simple grammar, phonetic Latin alphabet, and lack of difficult phonemes. Barry Farber described it as hands down the world's easiest language to learn. The FSI is a bit less optimistic, rating it as easier than most languages but still more difficult than English's close relatives. But now that it's available on the McDonald's of language learning, I'm pretty confident that I can make quick progress and maybe be able to skim newspaper articles by the end of this side-quest.
3: Massive utility
I would make the argument that the Indonesian Language is the most bang for your buck of any language in the world.
Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world, and at least 200 million of its population of 260 million speak Indonesian. It is a dialect of Malay, which is also an official language in Malaysia (population over 30 million), Singapore (population over 5 million, with around 10% speaking Malay at home), and Brunei (population around 1/2 million). It's hard to determine exactly how many Malay speakers there are, but I have seen estimates of up to 290 Million (although this is unsourced from Wikipedia).
While French and Spanish have more speakers, Latin America and la Francophonie are closely integrated with the Anglophone world, and you hear about them often on Anglophone international news outlets. Contrast with Indonesia, which you only hear about if a disaster happens even though it's one of the world's biggest countries. So the Indonesian language gives you access to a world that is fairly closed off from most Western news outlets.
~~~My Experience so far~~~
This is only my first day studying Indonesian but here are my first impressions.
The syntax reminds me a lot of Modern Hebrew. The word order is SVO (as in English as well). Adjectives seem to go after the nouns. And a copula ("to be") is typically not used.
The courses seem to be very inconsistent with pronouns. There are formal and informal pronouns. Here is an abbreviated list from Wikibooks:
Person | Singular Formal | Singular Informal | Plural |
1st (I/we) | Saya | Aku | Kita/Kami |
2nd (you) | Anda | Kamu | Kalian |
3rd (he/she/it/they) | Beliau | Dia | Mereka |
Duolingo seems to consistently use the formal for I (saya) but the informal for you (kamu) and he/she/it (dia). And Pimsleur uses the
[***Edit: Ibu is
I accept that since the Duolingo course is in Beta, I'll need to expect errors do a decent amount of research on my own. To be honest, I always expect this of Duolingo anyway. It's always in Beta even when they say it isn't.