Lalu lintas is the Indonesian word for ‘traffic’. It consists of lalu ‘pass by, pass through’ and lintas ‘move by quickly’. The combination of these two verbs characterises Indonesian traffic quite well: vehicles, mostly small motorbikes and generally small cars, plus the occasional bus and truck are passing by, sometimes slow and sometimes fast. What lalu lintas fails to reveal is that this lalu and lintas of vehicles (kendaraan) is, in Indonesia, never done in a coordinated or regulated way.
We plan to upgrade The Indonesian Way with a new feature: Dictation. Dictation?! Isn’t the word ‘dictation’ synonymous with ‘old-fashioned’, ‘boring’, and ‘teacher-centred’? Is it still useful in the age of communicative language learning? Dictation has been used in the field of language learning for hundreds of years. However, many language teachers and methodologists regard this method as useless and out-of-date. I disagree. I think that dictation is a useful activity, especially in e-learning. It forces the learner to actively
Studying new vocabulary items is very important if you learn a new language such as Indonesian. Indonesian Online employs various methods for the learner to efficiently learn new vocabulary items. Many students have their own strategy on how to memorise new words, and as long as you think that the way you are doing it, please go ahead and employ your own strategy. This is because each learner learns differently, and what works for student A may not work for
…and the Indonesian plural In textbooks for the Indonesian language you can sometimes read that the plural in Indonesian is simply formed by reduplicating the noun. In “Indonesian for Beginners” by Restiany Achmad, we can read on page 6: The plural form of countable nouns in Indonesian is very simple: double the noun when it has no number or a quantity word in it. The example he gives is anak (child), anak-anak (children), dua anak (two children), and banyak anak
In the article “Why no-one speaks Indonesia’s language” published in BBC Travel, BBC correspondent David Fettling claims that “Bahasa Indonesia has fewer words than most languages.” How does he know? He doesn’t. Instead, he relies on Endy Bayuni of The Jakarta Post, who has written that foreign translations of Indonesian novels tend to read better, while Indonesian translations of foreign novels sound ‘verbose and repetitive’. I completely agree with Mr. Endy Bayuni, but this is simply because Indonesia is indeed