The Aftermath of the Bahasa Indonesia Experiment

I attempted to learn Bahasa Indonesia on my own for a few months, then traveled around Java for a month. It was amazing and crazy, so I highly suggest it, but it's something you should experience for yourself instead of read about. Onward to the hackish intellectual stuff.

Yes, Bahasa Indonesia really is easy to learn. You can learn enough from just Pimsleur and Anki (or whatever substitutes fit your needs) in 6^th months to feel confident traveling solo in Indonesia (though plenty of people are confident doing so without speaking a word). You do have to study every day. Upon my arrival to the country, I estimate my concrete vocabulary was about 1000 words and I could infer the meaning of maybe a few hundred beyond that. I'm less sure, but I estimate about 1/3 of that vocabulary was not very useful. My grammar was pretty weak, but it got a little better with speaking practice, and most people understood what I was trying to say as long as I got all the right words in some semblance of order.

Summit of Mt. Lawu

And yes, many Indonesians do speak fantastic English. If you're a tourist, you won't learn anything. There's a Tijuana-flavored streamlined path that tourists take through the country, and anyone who wants to make any money from tourists is great at English. It's really interesting to step outside of that, and it's a helluva lot easier to do so with some basic Bahasa Indonesia under your belt. Some days there wasn't a single English speaker around. That being said, some days I went 6 hours at a time clearing my head and not speaking any Indonesian at all, limping along in tourist English. Your brain needs a rest sometimes, or at least mine does.

Here's the best resource I found: The Straight Dope on Bahasa Indonesia, compiled by James Alley. While I was doing Pimsleur and using the Anki decks that are already on the net, I also started reading through the Dope and making an Anki deck out of any words that seemed useful for me personally. I also made a deck of the whole first chapter, even though there was a lot of overlap. I figured the overlap wouldn't be bad to reinforce: I was right, I had the same basic conversation at least twice a day the entire month I was there. Exchanging those basic pleasantries first (“Where you from? What do you study?”) is the only way to get to the challenging stuff that I needed to practice. It would be a great idea to print out the Dope and take it with you on your journey. I met several teachers who had a lot of input on my language learning, but I didn't have the Dope to show them except on my phone. If your intent is to learn, you can be in vacation-mode 90% of the time but it's not a good idea to pass up educational opportunities like that.

If all goes to plan, this winter I'll be taking the second semester of Bahasa Indonesia at a real honest-to-god university, so I'll post about that in a few months. In the mean time, learn whatever the fuck you want without waiting for someone to teach you. I'm already starting on something else for next summer's potential adventure, and maybe you should be too.