Making Out in Indonesian Phrasebook & Dictionary: An Indonesian Language Phrasebook & Dictionary (with Manga Illustrations)

TIM HANNIGAN

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1 Nuts and Bolts

2 What’s Up?

3 Pleased to Meet You!

4 Hey There!

5 Got a Minute?

6 On the Road

7 Eat, Drink and Be Merry

8 Hitting the Shops

9 Tech Talk

10 Getting Social

11 Dating, Mating, Hating

ENGLISH–INDONESIAN DICTIONARY

Introduction

So someone told you that Indonesian was an easy language. You diligently learned the phrases at the back of your guidebook. You bought a home-learning course and trudged through its units—and yes, Indonesian grammar did seem pretty straightforward. You practiced earnestly on the staff in the hotel in Bali. They smiled politely and said that you were very pintar (clever). Everything seemed to be going so well—that is, until you attempted to have anything more than the most rudimentary interaction in Indonesian out on the street, or to eavesdrop on two locals in conversation.

The trouble is that Indonesian as it is actually used day-to-day is a very different thing from the language that is usually laid out in textbooks and phrasebooks. This can make life frustrating for would-be learners, so the aim of this book is to give you an introduction to the practical version of real spoken Indonesian. It won’t make you into an overnight linguistic virtuoso (you’ll need half a lifetime of immersion to get to that stage) or place you at the cutting edge of modern youth-speak (you’d need a permanent social media connection and the mental processing power of a supercomputer to keep up with that aspect of the language). However, if you’re already in the process of learning Indonesian it will help jumpstart you beyond the clunky formality stage, and if you’re just starting out it’ll give you a head start towards sounding a little less like a robot when you ask directions, order lunch, or haggle in the market! And the great news is that once you break away from the starchy syntax of formal Indonesian, it turns out to be a fabulously fun language, packing maximum expressiveness into very few words.

Languages, of course, are living things, closely bound up with the cultures of the people who speak them, so we’ve also peppered this book with some little tidbits to help you make sense of the wonderfully exciting country and people to which this language belongs.

INTRODUCING INDONESIAN

What exactly is Indonesian? The language refers to itself as Bahasa Indonesia. This simply means Indonesian Language—so don’t make the classic beginner’s error of asking, Do you speak Bahasa? The natural response to that would be: "Umm… which Bahasa?"

You’ll sometimes hear people say that Indonesian is some kind of made-up language, a Southeast Asian answer to Esperanto, invented by the nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. But this idea is based on a misunderstanding. Indonesian nationalists, campaigning for independence from Holland, did indeed invent a new name for the language (Bahasa Indonesia), but not the language itself. That had been around for millennia—it just used to be called Malay.

Indonesia is home to literally hundreds of other distinct languages and regional dialects, but these days almost everyone in this quarter-billion-strong population also speaks Indonesian. Apart from very remote rural areas, virtually everyone under the age of 50 is at least fluent in Indonesian, and in some places it has taken over from regional dialects as a first language.

BAHASA MELAYU

The language originally known as Malay has long been the lingua franca of Southeast Asia, good to get you by in harbor towns everywhere from southern Thailand to the borders of Papua New Guinea. Indonesian is the modern incarnation of Malay, but there are also other versions of the language spoken in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. The Bahasa Melayu of those neighboring countries is still very closely related to Indonesian, and fluent speakers of one can generally understand and make themselves understood in the other. But the languages are different enough that Malaysian movies and TV shows usually get dubbed or subtitled when they’re imported to Indonesia, and vice versa. A case in point: if you wanted to ask Do you speak Indonesian? in Bahasa Melayu you’d probably say Boléh cakap Bahasa Indonesia? Now, Indonesian-speakers would definitely understand those words, but they wouldn’t ask the question using these words—their version would be something like Bisa Bahasa Indonesia?

RULES OF THE GAME

A first glance at the Indonesian rule book is a refreshing experience for any English-speaker who’s previously struggled to learn another European language, still less something like Hebrew or Arabic. It all seems so straightforward! Tenses, when they’re used at all, are formed with marker words, leaving the core verbs unchanged. Pronouns don’t go shapeshifting—he, him and his are all covered by a single word. There’s no gender, and to all intents and purposes no plurals. Articles, definite and indefinite, don’t exist (well, rough equivalents for a and the actually do exist, but you don’t need to worry about them in the sort of Indonesian you’re learning here). And individual words are entirely unaffected by their neighbors in any given sentence—verbs remain blissfully unbothered by a change in the preceding pronoun.

But don’t get too excited! Because once you get beyond the basics you’ll quickly discover that Indonesian has other complications all of its own…

BUILDING BLOCKS

The main building blocks of Indonesian are root words from which verbs, nouns and adjectives can be built. Let’s take as an example the word bicara, speak.

NEW BEGINNINGS

To create the full form of a verb you add one of two prefixes—ber or me (the ber prefix sometimes becomes bel or be, and the me prefix sometimes needs to become mem, meng or occasionally meny, depending on the root it’s attaching to). Bicara takes the ber prefix, becoming berbicara = to speak.

To create the most obviously related noun from a root, you typically add the suffix an. So bicaraan is… yes, you’ve guessed it: conversation.

And the equivalent of sticking -er on the end of an English verb is to place the pe prefix (which sometimes has to become pem or pel, depending on the root) up front. So pembicara is speaker.

So far, so simple, but unfortunately, things get murkier from hereon in, with a series of other prefixes, suffixes, and prefix-suffix combos which have more abstract effects on the root. Membicarakan means to discuss something. Pembicaraan is discussion.

PASSIVELY SPEAKING

Then there’s the Indonesians’ love of that floppy, flaccid thing that English-language journalists are always taught to avoid—the passive voice. It’s used far more often in Indonesian