I am nowwhere near good at Bahasa Indonesia (I am also quite bad in English but that's another story) I don't have a head for languages.
But somehow i managed to pick up Indonesian quite fast. There were 2 reasons for that i think. Firstly i was still young when i came to Indonesia (early 20's) and secondly from the moment i set foot on Indonesian soil i plegdged to myself i would do anything to learn the language.
Waktu pertama kali datang ke Indonesia tahun 1994 dari Darwin ke Kupang Timor saya bertemu seorang gadis dari Zwitzerland di pesawat. Gadis ini bilang dia sudah sering ke Indonesia dan sudah lancar dalam Bahasa Indonesia. Dia sudah kasih bukti di dalam pesawat ngomong sama orang stewardess.
We joined and moved into the same losmen in Kupang (in Edwin Lerrick's Lavalon) and it soon became apparent she had been there often, she spoke to anybody in fluent Bahasa and she knew everybody, she also had a local boyfriend in Kupang. I bought a Kamus right away and started learning. I made the plan to learn 8 words every day and practise these words with locals, in the beginning i could of course not make any coherent sentences, and the first time i tried to do so i found out to my frustration that Indonesian grammar was very different from Dutch or English.
The "do you have this or that" was the first sentence i learned (wrong)
I first learned the words:
Lakukan = do
anda = you
mempunyai = have
So i went to a store where i wanted to buy something and i asked the seller "Melakukan anda mempunya roti (or whatever i asked i long forgot).
To my frustration the salesguy did not understand what i meant. I kept repeating but he just shook his head and kept saying "tidak mengerti" which i understood meant i don't understand. So i thought the words must have a different meaning and the Kamus and the guys i had been practising these words with had set me up.
It took some while for the penny to drop (after 2 months or so) but once it had dropped i made progress very quickly and within 4 months i could have a simple conversation.
Later i learned Bahasa very well, and i even started to read the Kompas. But i also adopted the lingo of the Newspaper on the street and i got a problem again like before, so i soon stopped reading the newspaper in Indonesian and moved to the Jakarta Post.
Unfortunately between 1996 and 2005 or so i spend most of my time in The Netherlands and forgot very much of my Indonesian, and i never got back on the level i had been before, nowadays my Bahasa is ok, i can still hold a decent conversation (albeit with lots of errors) but my vocabulary is much more limited then it used to be. (forgot lots of words).
But somehow i managed to pick up Indonesian quite fast. There were 2 reasons for that i think. Firstly i was still young when i came to Indonesia (early 20's) and secondly from the moment i set foot on Indonesian soil i plegdged to myself i would do anything to learn the language.
Waktu pertama kali datang ke Indonesia tahun 1994 dari Darwin ke Kupang Timor saya bertemu seorang gadis dari Zwitzerland di pesawat. Gadis ini bilang dia sudah sering ke Indonesia dan sudah lancar dalam Bahasa Indonesia. Dia sudah kasih bukti di dalam pesawat ngomong sama orang stewardess.
We joined and moved into the same losmen in Kupang (in Edwin Lerrick's Lavalon) and it soon became apparent she had been there often, she spoke to anybody in fluent Bahasa and she knew everybody, she also had a local boyfriend in Kupang. I bought a Kamus right away and started learning. I made the plan to learn 8 words every day and practise these words with locals, in the beginning i could of course not make any coherent sentences, and the first time i tried to do so i found out to my frustration that Indonesian grammar was very different from Dutch or English.
The "do you have this or that" was the first sentence i learned (wrong)
I first learned the words:
Lakukan = do
anda = you
mempunyai = have
So i went to a store where i wanted to buy something and i asked the seller "Melakukan anda mempunya roti (or whatever i asked i long forgot).
To my frustration the salesguy did not understand what i meant. I kept repeating but he just shook his head and kept saying "tidak mengerti" which i understood meant i don't understand. So i thought the words must have a different meaning and the Kamus and the guys i had been practising these words with had set me up.
It took some while for the penny to drop (after 2 months or so) but once it had dropped i made progress very quickly and within 4 months i could have a simple conversation.
Later i learned Bahasa very well, and i even started to read the Kompas. But i also adopted the lingo of the Newspaper on the street and i got a problem again like before, so i soon stopped reading the newspaper in Indonesian and moved to the Jakarta Post.
Unfortunately between 1996 and 2005 or so i spend most of my time in The Netherlands and forgot very much of my Indonesian, and i never got back on the level i had been before, nowadays my Bahasa is ok, i can still hold a decent conversation (albeit with lots of errors) but my vocabulary is much more limited then it used to be. (forgot lots of words).
Last edited:
Always maintained the best way to learn a language is to get a girl/boy friend in that language. The only difficult part is to convince the wife that it's only for language purposes.
Good post. Learning the numbers is the first thing anyone should do when learning a new language.