Raja Ampat Islands, Indonesia
Are you an English speaker interested learning a language?Curious about how other people think and talk around the world?
Ever get tired of the same places, people, thoughts and routine?
Language self-study may be your next step. Whether for:
- Traveling: take tourism to a whole new level
- Studying abroad: experience real culture first-hand
- Impressing a crush: words go straight to the heart
- Expanding your business: reach out to a greater clientele
- Or, personal improvement: add enrichment to your life
This blog, Bahasa Brian, is a project I started to document my learning of the Indonesian, which I believe is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn, in addition to Norwegian and Afrikaans.
Why? Well, first off, if you're sick of tedious study and rote memorization when it comes to languages, here are four refreshing things about in Indonesian (adapted from this Wikibooks article):
#1: No tenses.
Indonesian does not mark tenses in a verb with inflections like English (example: eat, ate, eaten, etc.) or other languages like Spanish and German do.
Instead, it uses time phrases like today or yesterday or aspect markers like in the process of or done as well as contextual clues.
#2: No gender or case.
Ever study a Romance language? You'll know that with each noun comes a special, often arbitrary gender to memorize along with it. Example in Spanish: mesa is feminine, jardÃn is masculine.
With Indonesian, you don't have to worry about gender or case inflections. Easy!
#3: No tones.
Tones in linguistics refer to pitch changes made by the speaker that distinguish the meaning of different words.
Many Asian languages such as Chinese (my favorite), Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, and Hmong make use of tone, which is something that frightens many language learners from these critical languages.
Indonesian has no tones, so fret not, and no excuses! :-) Also, stress is consistent and usually on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable of an Indonesian word.
#4: No irregularity.
The grammar is regular. Simple rules, very few exceptions. Done.
And moreover, below are a couple qualities of Indonesian grammar that it even MORE simple to learn:
#1: Simple plurals.
Instead of complicated plural forms like you might find in German or Arabic, Indonesian makes the process simple and cuts out unnecessary fluff.
Simply reduplicate (double) a noun to make it plural. Example: buku = book, buku-buku = books.
Often even reduplication isn't necessary. Just use a quantifier like many or few and the meaning is understood.
#2: Simple morphology.
Morphology is the way that words are constructed. For example in English, the world light can become lighten or lightly and so on, all from the basic morpheme light.
Indonesian words are easy to form, using a wide variety of prefixes. For example: satu = one, bersatu = unify (with ber- prefix).
Note that there are some rules to learn with these affixes, though, but it's nothing that should stop someone from digging into this language.
#3: Simple writing system.
Indonesian as it is written in modern society makes use of the Latin alphabet, which is used by English and most Western languages and is widely accepted.
After many spelling reforms in the 20th century, Indonesian is now standardized, phonetic (written as it sounds), and poses no roadblock for a learner to dive into real literature and other first-hand texts.
#4: Simple word order.
Just like in English, the basic structure of an Indonesian sentence follows the order SVO (Subject, Verb, then Object). No need for concern about confusing word placement.
This makes it especially easy to start USING and composing writing in your new language, which is really nice. For example, many languages like Turkish (which I do love, don't get me wrong) use a word order which causes difficulty to the beginning learner to start speaking right away.
So there we have it. I hope this post shows you a bit about Indonesian so that you may consider taking a look at it if you hadn't thought of it.
Sometimes starting with an easier task can be a gateway of opportunity for more to come. If you're interested in starting Indonesian, check out these books and subscribe here to stay in the know with future lessons and resource blogs.
And even if not, at least I got to spoon-feed you a little bit of linguistics and language-learning inspiration (for whatever language) with this blog post.
Get out there and try it ... it's easy, fun, and very rewarding. Every minute you spend learning a new language is a minute invested in your future success and worldliness!
Selamat belajar,
Bahasa Brian
P.S. - Here are two discussions about Indonesia as "easiest language":
- Indonesian -- easiest language to learn? at Antimoon
- How easy is it to learn Bahasa Indonesian? at Lonely Planet
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