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Are there many Indonesian learners here | ||
Tags: Meeting Forum Members | Indonesian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jimmymac Senior Member United Kingdom strange-lands.com/le Joined 6154 days ago 276 posts - 362 votes  Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 12 20 March 2012 at 9:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been studying Indonesian for about a year now. I've posted a couple of times here about this language but I haven't gotten many replies.
Is Indonesian a particularly unpopular language on this forum? We actually moved to Yogyakarta a couple of weeks back and we've found it surprisingly difficult to meet people for language exchanges. Any memebers from Jogja who would to like to meet for a language exchange? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5730 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 2 of 12 20 March 2012 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It seems there are about 260 people who learn or speak Indonesian on the forum.
I wouldn't exactly call it unpopular, it's just that most learners on the forum are either American or European, and Indonesia is far away from those places. Also, Indonesia isn't really a growing economic superpower like China, so people who want to learn an Asian language go for Mandarin, Korean, or Japanese instead. I heard many educated Indonesians know English, so the people who do business in the country could just rely on their English. I don't know anything about Indonesian culture or literature so I couldn't comment on whether these would draw people into learning the language. Barry Farber said Indonesian is the easiest natural language in the world in his book "How to Learn Any Language", so that might attract some people. Like I've been saying of Esperanto, I wouldn't recommend learning a language just because it's supposed to be easy because people would quit when it got frustrating. Personally, I couldn't think of any reason I'd want to learn Indonesian, unless I became friends with some Indonesians. How have you found learning Indonesian? Is it easier than the other languages you've been learning? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 3 of 12 20 March 2012 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yogyakarta is supposed to be a center for Indonesian language teaching. Have you checked out the situation with language schools? If so, I'd be curious to know some details, such as which schools are recommended, whether they have group classes on a regular schedule, etc.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 12 20 March 2012 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm learning it as well. There are three very important reasons for this: I have a friend from there; It's an easy language; It's interesting from the linguistic point of view. Take away any of these three reasons and I'd not be studying it.
The grammar is easy indeed but the vocabulary is about as difficult as Finnish. In fact, as Finnish grammar has also been quite easy for me, I'd put them into the same category. I don't know anything about Indonesian literature yet but it definitely has better music than Esperanto :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| manish Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5547 days ago 88 posts - 136 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, German Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 12 20 March 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Any good free online ressources for Indonesian? I have a pretty good memory, so the vocabulary doesn't bother me, and I'm definitely looking for languages with easy grammar.
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| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5730 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 6 of 12 20 March 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Indonesian/ http://web.uvic.ca/lancenrd/indonesian/ I haven't used either one, so I can't say if they are good or not, but they are free.
What are Indonesian's linguistic points of interests? Edit: how do you get URLs to display? My links weren't opening. Edited by Michael K. on 21 March 2012 at 12:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 7 of 12 20 March 2012 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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http://learningindonesian.com/ is a great resource :) I've only done the free lessons but there are also premium ones.
To post a link, click the fourth button above the new message area and follow the instructions :) The points of interest are basically everything that can be interesting about a language. Morphology, syntax, vocabulary... <3 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 12 21 March 2012 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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I got started on Indonesian more or less by accident (and contrary to my earlier principle about staying within the Indoeuropean languages).
A couple of years ago I visited several places in the Philippines. In Cebu I bought a language guide to the Cebuan language which used related examples and therefore also helped the reader with pattern building. So my curiosity was aroused, and when I got to Manila I bought several tiny dictionaries and a language guide to Tagalog/Filipino, and I began a serious study of the verbal forms in this language. After I returned home I even decided to start learning it, but then realized that my dictionaries couldn't help me with the majority of the unkown words in ordinary texts (from for instance Wikipedia) so I dropped it. On year later I visited Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore I picked up a tourist guide in Bahasa and a parallel version in English, and then I went on to visit Kuching in Serawak. Here I tried to find books in Bahasa Melayu, but found very little - except a dictionary, which was one step better than those I had bought in Manila. In Kuala Lumpur I visited a mega bookstore in the Petronas Tower shopping center, but even here they had very little literature about science and technology in Bahasa Melayu - everything of that kind was in English. When I got back home I had decided to study Malaysian, but it turned out that my guidebooks from Singapore AND most texts about Sarawak on the internet actually weren't in Malaysian, but in Indonesian. I found out about this because of one funny detail: I had bought several extremely cheap books in the Philippines, including my preferred Latin dictionary and... lo and behold ... an Indonesian dictionary! And now I found out that I had something to use it for so I dropped Malaysian for the time being and switched to Indonesian. And I'm still pursuing the study of this language. The funny thing is that it reminds me of English, just with even less explicit morphology. Of course I don't know whether my attempts to write in Bahasa are halfway or totally rubbish, but when I read texts in Bahasa Indonesia the meaning are normally fairly clear, and things like word order don't seem to pose a problem with this language. The main obstacle is vocabulary - there are very few loan words, and those I see are mostly mangled almost beyond recognition. But it is definitely a language which is learnable, and now I'm beginning to wonder whether there are other things in that region which could be more interesting than just one more Germanic or Romance language. PS to post a link: you can also write [URL#=YourLink]SomeText[/URL#] and insert your link with CTRL V, including the http: part. PS: remove the #'s - if I didn't mangle the tags in some way you would just see a link. If you do it manually you won't have the problem with automatically inserted spaces. Edited by Iversen on 21 March 2012 at 2:33pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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