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Grammars

There are numerous grammars on the market and all have their advantages and disadvantages. The Indonesian Reference Grammar by James Neil Sneddon is one of the most comprehensive grammars and we highly recommend it. Sneddon also published Understanding Indonesian Grammar. This a reference and workbook designed primarily for intermediate and advanced students in senior years of high school and at the university level. It is very useful for learners as it contains exercises that you will not find in the Reference Grammar.

Do I need a Grammar?

Users of «The Indonesian Way» do not need to acquire a grammar (although we still recommend it). We highly recommend that as students progress to more advanced courses like «Aneka Baca», «Baca Yuk», «Serba-Serbi Nusantara», «Ada Apa dengan Cinta», or «Anak Jalanan», they acquire and regularly refer to Sneddon’s Reference Grammar.

Dictionaries

Bilingual Dictionaries

A bilingual dictionary or translation dictionary is a specialised dictionary used to translate words or phrases from one language to another. Most bilingual dictionaries are bidirectional. You will use the Indonesian–English version more often than the English-Indonesian version, but it is a good idea to purchase both.

The most superior Indonesian-English dictionary available is A Comprehensive Indonesian-English Dictionary: 2nd Edition by Alan M. Stevens & A. Schmidgall-Tellings (Editors). However, it comes with a relatively high cost. An economical yet reliable alternative is Kamus Indonesia-Inggris: An Indonesian-English Dictionary by Hassan Shadily along with an English-Indonesian dictionary by the same author, both of which are commendable. They are slightly outdated, but when you can get a cheap second-hand copy, go for it.

Another excellent option is the English-Indonesian Learner’s Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian by George Quinn. These are the only recommendations we have at the moment. If you are in Indonesia, book shops sell Indonesian-English dictionaries for a few bucks. Stay away from them!

Keep in mind that excellent bilingual dictionaries are also available for other languages than English.

Monolingual Dictionaries

If you already have a relatively high proficiency in Indonesian, consider a monolingual dictionary instead. The Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, commonly abbreviated as KBBI is the official Indonesian dictionary. The official Malaysian dictionary is called Kamus Dewan and you can perfectly use it for Bahasa Indonesia as well. We do not recommend monolingual dictionaries for beginners, but it becomes an excellent resource as you progress.

Finding a paper version of the KBBI outside of Indonesia is a challenge, but you don’t need one anyway. The KBBI is available online for free, and it is even better than the print version as it is constantly updated. You can access it KBBI website. It is also available as a free application for iPhones and Android smart phones.

Online Dictionaries

Online dictionaries are great. With a print dictionary, you have to look up the root word. You will not find the word perusahaan under the letter p because the root word is usaha. Online dictionaries make it easy, but you need to be aware that even the best online dictionaries are inferior to printed dictionaries. Until now there is not a single online dictionary that is fully reliable. The only online dictionary that we can recommend with caution (it contains a few mistakes) is Indodic (free). We also strongly advise against using Google Translate. You can use Google Translate (with caution) to translate entire sentences, but for translating single words it is pretty useless as it only provides one translation

Austronesian Languages*

In Indonesian, the Indonesian language is called bahasa Indonesia. It is essentially the same language as Malay (Bahasa Melayu) or Malaysian (Bahasa Malaysia). Bahasa Indonesia is the national language of Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia is the national language of Malaysia and Brunei, and one of four national languages of Singapore.

In 1928 Indonesian nationalists declared that the Malay language shall be called Indonesian. However, the Dutch, the colonial masters, continued to call the language Malay and it was only after the Dutch lost their colony in the second world war that Malay officially became known as Indonesian.

Formal Indonesian and formal Malaysian are almost perfectly identical. However, in both countries people speak many different Malay dialects. In Indonesia, Betawi Malay, the language of Jakarta, is becoming increasingly popular. Betawi Malay has strongly influenced colloquial Indonesian, especially on the island of Java, but also in many urban centres outside of Java.

Some Malay dialects are mutually intelligible, but other dialects of Malay can be very different from each other. A Malaysian from the north-eastern state of Terengganu and an Indonesian from Manado will not be able to understand each other – even though both speak Malay dialects. But as soon as they switch to standard Malaysian and standard Indonesian, they will perfectly understand each other.

Indonesian-Malaysian Malay is the largest member of the Austronesian language family. The total number of Austronesian languages is about 400, but many of them are small languages.

The most prominent members of the Austronesian language family are:

1. Malay Malay is spoken natively by about 18 million Malaysians and 100 million Indonesians. The total number of speakers of Malay is approximately 290 million. Besides in Indonesian and Malaysia, Malay is also spoken in Brunei-Darussalam, Singapore, and in Patani—the southernmost province of Thailand.
2. Javanese Javanese is spoken in central and East Java by approximately 100 million native speakers.
3. Sundanese Sundanese is spoken by 42 million speakers in West Java.
4. Filipino Filipino or Tagalog is spoken natively by about 30 million Filipinos. The total number of speakers of Filipino is approximately 70 million.
5. Cebuano Cebuano is a Philippine language spoken by approximately 30 million speakers in total. Many of them are bilingual speakers of Cebuano and Filipino.
6. Malagasy Malagasy is spoken by about 25 million people in Madagascar. It is related to the languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and specifically to the East Barito languages spoken in Borneo, with apparent influence from early Old Malay. Madagascar was settled by Indonesians at some time during the first millennium.

Other popular Austronesian languages are Ilokano (8m), Ilonggo (7m), and Bikol (5m)—all spoken in the Philippines. Other large Austronesian languages spoken in Indonesia are Madurese (14m), Minangkabau (7m), Betawi Malay (5m), Batak (4m), Bugis (4m), Banjar Malay (4m), and Balinese (3m).

Austronesian languages are also spoken in Oceania, but all of them are relatively small. Some of the better known languages of Oceania are Hawaiian, Maori, Fijian, Samoan, Tongan and Tahitian.

Tetum, the national language of East Timor is also an Austronesian language. Tetum is spoken by some 800,000 speakers.

In the following table you can see how similar Austronesian languages are. But keep in mind that we deliberately chose words that tend to be very conservative. If you look at the lowest row in the table, you can see that the word for “mouth”, for instance, is much less conservative. Some Austronesian languages are as closely related as English and German, while other languages are as different from each other as English and Russian.

There is no question whether a learner should be taught authentic Indonesian or not. Yet, many textbooks and Indonesian language Internet sites teach Indonesian phrases that no Indonesian would ever use.

For instance, it is quite common to find textbooks that translate ‘good bye’ as selamat tinggal. Selamat tinggal is the reply to selamat jalan. Selamat is ‘safe’, tinggal is ‘leave behind’, and jalan is ‘journey’. Hence selamat jalan is ‘bon voyage/have a good trip’. And yes, selamat tinggal is ‘good bye’, but only in response to selamat jalan.

The learner gets the impression that he/she can use selamat tinggal whenever an English speaker would use ‘good bye’. That is not the case. If you want to say ‘good bye, see you tomorrow’ then the best way to say ‘good bye’ is just simply mari, and ‘good bye, see you tomorrow’ is mari, sampai besok.

On an Indonesian language learning website I found the sentence semoga hari kamu menyenangkan ‘I hope you have a pleasant day’. This phrase is completely unidiomatic. It is a 100% translation from English, and I have not heard it even once in my life! And the worst is that they teach kamu ‘you’ without mentioning that kamu can only be used in colloquial Indonesian and only to very close friends or towards someone much younger than the speaker. If you use kamu to address anyone who is either considerably older than you, or who is in a superior position, then you insult that person!

So be very careful when choosing a textbook. We at «Indonesian Online» teach Indonesian embedded in its cultural context, and we only teach authentic and idiomatic Indonesian.

So here a few useful phrases for small talk:

When you ask someone “How are you?” you are, in most cases, not inquiring about your interlocutors well-being, but you are just using it as a conversation starter. The Indonesian phrase is apa kabar?, which literally means “What are the news?”. It is answered by either “Baik” (good), “Baik, baik saja” (just fine), or “Biasa-biasa saja” (as always). The latter is slightly sloppy and should only be used among friends. So a conversation goes:

Is there something missing? Don’t you have to ask back “And you?”. The majority of all Indonesian language textbooks teaches their learners how to say “And you?”. But why? Nobody in Indonesia ever asks back “And you?”. It does not exist. So why teaching it? You’re perfectly polite by not asking back.

An alternative answer, appropriate when you bump into someone you know, is to ask where she is going to. Here again, the person does not really want to know where you are going to. Again, it’s simply a conversation starter:

You can also answer tidak ke mana-mana (no where in particular), jalan-jalan saja (I’m just going for a stroll), or makan angin (getting some fresh air).

You can, of course, also make the conversation a bit more formal by replacing he (hey) with selamat pagi (good morning), or selamat in combination with the other times of the day: siang (from 10:00 to 14:00), sore (14:00 to 18:00), and malam (after sunset).

And what do you say when parting? The most common is just simply mari, but you can also say sampai bertemu lagi (till we meet again) or the more informal sampai jumpa (see you). Lots of ways to say ‘good-bye’, but never use selamat tinggal unless that person is going on a journey and you will not see him again for some time.

A few weeks ago I had to sit in a Samoan language class for evaluating purposes. The teacher explained that in the Samoan language susu is the word for ‘milk’. It is hence exactly the same word as in Indonesian.

Samoan and Malay—Two Austronesian Languages

Samoan and Malay (Indonesian) are both descendants of the same language family, which is called Austronesian (“The Southern Islands”). Essential and frequently used words tend to be conservative and do not change easily. So the words mata (eye), lima (five) are identical to Indonesian while other words have undergone slight phonetic changes. The Indonesian-Malay sepuluh (ten) has become sefulu in Samoan, and Malay words that have a final consonant, see that consonant lost in Samoan: langit (sky) became lagi (pronounced langi).

The fact that susu has the same meaning in Indonesian and Samoan is not surprising. But what really surprised me is, that the teacher explained further that the word susu, besides ‘milk’, also means ‘female breast’. This is again, exactly the same meaning as in Malay-Indonesian.

Other words for female breast are payudara, buah dada, and tetek.

‘To suck at the breast or udder, to suckle, breastfeed’ is either menyusu or menetek. ‘

To nourish at the breast, to nurse, breastfeed’ is menyusui or meneteki

Menetek and menyusu are intransitive words, that is, they cannot take an object:

We have added yet another feature to The Indonesian Way. Almost every lessons has one or more exercises which are always named like Exercise 04-01 etc. To many of these exercises we have added a voice recording feature. In the exercise a certain task is given, which contains the instruction to record a few sentences. For instance in Exercise 04-02 (Lesson 04 of The Indonesian Way), the following instruction is given:

Listen to each of the ten items below and repeat them. Each item gives you the name of a common food or drink. Insert this word after the verb makan or minum in a sentence like the sentences practised in the substitution exercise above. For example, if the cue word is ikan you might record something like: Saya suka makan ikan di pasar.

You can go ahead and add further sentences with slight modifications: Saya suka minum es cendol di Pasar Beringin. Ibu saya suka makan ikan goreng di Rumah Makan Sentosa, etc. Using the built-in voice recorder you can record the sentences as many times as you want, and you can listen to them and you can even download them.

If you are not sure whether your pronunciation, word choice, or grammar is 100% correct, you can register with IndoLingo and send the file per email to the IndoLingo instructor. She (or he) is a native speaker, and will respond to you in voice recording (and if necessary also in writing). This additional service is available for a small fee per IndoLingo assignment.

This is how the recording button looks like. Try it out right here!