lol
You replied to a post of mine from several years ago. Sorry, but I am not going to spend my time translating some text to prove to you over the internet that my Indonesian is fluent. Any of the forum members who have met me will tell you it is, but it's really not that big of a deal. If you shoved a newspaper in my face in person, I'd probably translate the first paragraph for you as it would be enough to erase any doubt.
I maintain that Indonesian is easy to learn, but difficult to master. You are absolutely right about most people just using the root words. I received a call yesterday from an expat saying he had lived here for a year and was desperate to learn Indonesian as he knew almost none so far. My advice was to really learn the prefixes and suffixes inside and out and how they change the root words. To me, grasping that concept is what takes most people's Bahasa Indonesia to the next level.
The funny thing though for me, is that when long-term expats start "dick-sizing" about their language abilities, there are so many things you can nitpick at and there is probably no universally satisfying way to speak Indonesian that pleases everyone, unless you spoke completely perfect and formally which nobody does anyways.
For example, I learned to speak Indonesian in Bali (along with Balinese) and when speaking Indonesian, my accent, style of talking, word order etc is decidedly Balinese. For example if someone asks me where I got something and the answer is that a friend gave it to me, I would say "aku dikasih minta". This in Indonesian makes no sense and people from Jakarta wouldn't understand it all. Balinese all understand it though as it's a direct translation from their own version of "baang ngidih" which is their own language so of course makes perfect sense to them.
Case in point being, we could all sit around and compare language abilities, prove our abilities through translating text and bash the people who make mistakes. At the same time though, some of those mistakes are actually intentional and make speech more authentic, a very non-western concept as far as languages go. For the record though, usually when I make little Balinese "mistakes" in my speech, I still know the proper way of saying it in Indonesian, just as Balinese do, but it is not the way people here talk.
