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How Difficult Is Indonesian? | ||
Tags: Indonesian | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5447 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 35 11 July 2010 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Haha, yeah, you're right. Any language's grammar will get much easier with time. :D
I was thinking of getting a Teach Yourself guide from amazon, as that's seems to be the best book I can get on Indonesian at the moment. :/ Edited by brian91 on 11 July 2010 at 6:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hilmanshini Newbie Indonesia Joined 5240 days ago 14 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 10 of 35 25 July 2010 at 4:14am | IP Logged | ||
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you can learn to me maybe, i am indonesian...
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 11 of 35 26 July 2010 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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This is my last day in Malaysia (where a Bahasa very closely related to Indonesian is spoken), and I have been here slightly more than two weeks. About one week before coming here I dropped my Lonely Planet language guide to Malaysian (for reasons that can be read elsewhere) and switched to the Indonesian one, and at the same time I bought an Indonesian-English-Indonesian dictionary and printed a lot of pages from the internet. Since then I have been focussed on learning some kind of Indonesian/Malaysian almost to the exclusion of other projects - so all in all this atypical state has lasted for around three weeks now.
I will write more in my language learning log about this endeavour, but I can already now say quite a lot about learning these languages at the elementary level. And what I can certify is that they are exactly as easy to master at this level as I read before I started out doing it myself. The main problem is of course the 'native' vocabulary which bascially doesn't have anything in common with English or other Western languages. But there are lots of loanwords, even though their spelling is quite idiosyncratic at times (final letters tend to be chopped off - for instance a 'lif' is a "lift"), and there are derivational patterns that link many of the local words. Morphology is almost non existant ('saya' is both "I" and "me" and "my") and word classes are as flexible as in English, if not more. So you can get a grip on both variants very fast. But presumably this means that all the difficult points will be in questions of idiomatics, so you will have a hard time becoming nativelike in your use of the simple ingredients - just as in English, which is another typically 'slippery' language. Edited by Iversen on 28 July 2010 at 4:20am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mosij Newbie United States Joined 5634 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: Spanish, Indonesian | Message 12 of 35 06 August 2010 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||
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"These links should still be working for a very intensive Indonesian course
Indonesian: http://rapidshare.com/files/271959174/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.001 http://rapidshare.com/files/272080467/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.002 http://rapidshare.com/files/272094315/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.003 If not let me know and I can re-post them. Good Luck!" Is there any way you can repost these, they don't seem to be working for me. Thanks in advance. mosi Edited by mosij on 08 August 2010 at 5:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Uthnapistim Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 5697 days ago 19 posts - 25 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: German, Indonesian | Message 13 of 35 08 August 2010 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
There is a superfluous space character before the "zip". After removing it the links work fine. May I also recommend http://www.learningindonesian.com/. There is something like 20 hours of audio material that will lead you from complete beginner to well on your way toward conversational Indonesian. About half of it is freely available on the website. I now went through the first two lessons of the DLI course, and compared to the learningindonesian.com material the learning curve is steeper at least in that new vocabulary is introduced much more rapidly. However, the DLI course is from 70ies and a small part of the vocabulary and spelling of certain words seems dated. Edit: Here are the fixed links for the DLI course http://rapidshare.com/files/271959174/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.001 http://rapidshare.com/files/272080467/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.002 http://rapidshare.com/files/272094315/DLI_Indonesian_Course. zip.003 After downloading you need to merge the three files together to get the actual .zip file. (I used HJSplit but any program that can concatenate multiple binary files into one will do) Edited by Uthnapistim on 08 August 2010 at 7:14pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5835 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 14 of 35 09 August 2010 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||
I would be interested to know why you switched from Malay to Indonesian. Where can we read about this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mosij Newbie United States Joined 5634 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Studies: Spanish, Indonesian | Message 15 of 35 09 August 2010 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Uthnapistim, you wise king you!!!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 16 of 35 09 August 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||
In the Lonely Planet Guide to Bahasa Malaysia the pronunciation 'help' is in an ugly green color, and it is placed exactly where I would have expected to find the original phrase in Bahasa. So everytime I would use the book the first thing that would meet my eyes would be some confusing Englishlooking nonsense, and only then I could find the original text in Bahasa, whose orthography incidentally is so neat and tidy that it is totally absurd to replace it with anything else (except maybe IPA, if it had been a scientific work). In the Indonesian guide from the same series (which I bought as a souvenir long ago) I see the Bahasa version first, and the English pronunciation 'help' is printed in a more eye-friendly reddish colour which makes it possible to ignore it. So even though I was travelling to Malaysia, I brought along the Indonesian guide, not the Malayan one. While I was in Kuching I bought a good Bahasa Malaysia - Bahasa Inggeris dictionary (from Oxford), though one that has the idiosyncratic structure in the B.M. --> B.I. part that it (in most cases) quotes the words without prefixes, and then it gives translations and examples illustrating the most common prefixes in that article. This system actually functions quite well, and it is eminently congenial to the structure of Bahasa M. (I would love to have a similar dictionary for Russian!). So since I bought it I have been basing all my wordlists on this dictionary, and that's the reason why I have put Malay under my 'studied' languages, not Indonesian. Eventually I will of course try to learn both variants with their 'false friends' and different pronunciation, and to help me with this I also have a reasonable good dictionary for Bahasa Indonesia at home. I use both dictionaries when I read stuff, and sometimes I find the unknown words in the 'wrong' version for a given text (see example below). But I do stick to one version of Bahasa when I do my wordlists. Then I can go back and sort out the confusion later and proceed to learning TWO separate languages and not a mixture. There is a long list of differences in an article in the English Wikipedia, and studying that list will of course be the first step in this cleaning-up operation. But right now I try to learn as many words as possible whatever their source, and then I just make a note if a certain word only is found in one of my dictionaries. For instance I met the word 'bahagian' in a text about the Sarawak Museum in Kuching (in Malaysia). I found "bahagia" with the translation 'happiness' in both dictionaries, but only the Indonesian one contained the word "bahagian" for 'part'. So the dividing line between the Bahasas is anything but clear, especially in Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei. Edited by Iversen on 09 August 2010 at 1:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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