One of my favorite parts about Bahasa Indonesia is that the verbs have no tenses. You really don't realize how complicated a language is until you have to conjugate the verbs. That came for me when I learned Spanish in high school and college. It was torture. Then when I moved here and started sometimes teaching English, I realized exactly how complicated English is. And I will feel eternally grateful that I am a native speaker and I don't have to pay attention to which verb goes with which subject in which tense, because I just string those things together naturally. I mean, we make grammar rules that are different for different words - and then we don't even follow them half of the time! At least Spanish plays by the rules. I can't count the number of times I have apologized to people learning English for the complicated-ness that is English. Like really, truly, from the bottom of my heart. If I had to learn English as a second language, I would honestly probably give up out of sheer frustration.
All of this has made me extremely grateful to live in a country with a fairly basic unifying language. I really don't think I would be very proficient otherwise.
Let me give you an example using a common verb.
Makan = Eat.
Saya sudah makan. (I have already eaten.)
Saya belum makan. (I have not yet eaten.)
Saya lagi makan. (I am eating.)
Kemarin saya makan. (Yesterday I ate.)
Dia akan makan. (He will eat.)
Mereka mau makan. (They want to eat.)
Kita harus makan. (We need to eat.)
Notice how the verb NEVER CHANGES even when the subject and tense change? Beautiful, right?!
Let's try another verb.
Pulang = Come/go home
Saya mau pulang. (I want to go home.)
Dia belum pulang. (He hasn't come home yet.)
Sebentar lagi kami akan pulang. (In a minute we will go home.)
Mereka akan pulang besok. (They will come home tomorrow.)
Saya lagi pulang. (I'm going home.)
Dia tidak akan pulang. (She won't be coming home.)
See what I mean?! Piece of cake! And one more beautiful thing is that since there are no conjugations, there is no such thing as an irregular verb in Indonesian! If that doesn't make you fall in love with the language, I really don't know what will.
The other thing that makes learning Indonesian a breeze is the fact that the entire language is gender neutral. For English only speakers: this means that there is only one word for he, she, and it. Dia. That one simple word covers it all. And there is no distinction between things like niece and nephew (keponokan for both) or boyfriend and girlfriend (pacar for both). For people who have learned a Latin based language: this means that there are no articles and none of the nouns have gender! What a relief...
This can get confusing sometimes though. For example, when someone is telling a story about multiple people and they are all just "dia". You tend to lose track of who did what to whom eventually. It is also humorous that "Dia", "Dyah", and "Dea" are all Indonesian names.
The one downfall of Indonesian is that because it is such a simple language, it is also very limited. Several years ago, I was trying to express to a friend in Indonesian how truly wonderful something was, but I only knew the word for good. Bagus. So I asked my friend the word for amazing, and he said, "bagus". I asked the word for wonderful, he said, "bagus". I asked about stupendous, marvelous, spectacular, exquisite, and several other synonyms. They were all bagus. Pretty much the only way to add extra emphasis is to add "very" before it. So then it became "sangat bagus". Very good.
So basically, we have this:
Pros
No verb conjugations
No articles
No gender
Not too much vocab to memorize
Cons
Relies very heavily on context which is sometimes not clear
Difficult to express extremes
My friends tell me I need to learn Javanese because it has a lot more adjectives and ways to express meaning. I mean, it has to right? The language has four levels and four sets of vocab!
I'll get there eventually. But at the end of the day (which it now is), I am thankful for Indonesian and its simplicity. It is sangat bagus.
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