INDONESIAN LANGUAGE: HOW EASY IT IS

I am an Indonesian and now I am working as an Indonesian language teacher for foreign language speakers.

When I was at school, my Indonesian language score was not as high as other subjects, even the English score was higher than Indonesian. Like some other Indonesian students at that time, I did not study hard for this subject because this is my mother tongue, and I knew my language. It is better to study hard for other 'cool' subjects as English, Maths, Physics, although I struggled in Indonesian subjects especially when it was about literature and its grammar.

Long story short, I got a job as a part-time Indonesian language teacher at Realia, I had to join the training before I was allowed to teach. As time goes by, they taught me a lot about the Indonesian language. I found out that the Indonesian language is easy to learn.

Here are some reasons why the Indonesian language is easy to learn:

• It's a phonetic language. That means you can look at a written word and know how to pronounce it. Or you can hear a word and know how to spell it. With phonetic languages, there is a direct relationship between spelling and sound.
• There are no such things like a, an, the, of, am, is, are, was, were. It has no meaning in the Indonesian language.
• Indonesian has no tenses, so you don't have to remember irregular verbs like in English. Go went gone = pergi.
• Word per word translation might work in the Indonesian language but all you need is to pay attention to "head" and "modifier" just swaps it. Note: if you are French, you don't have to do that.
• There are lots of Indonesian who learn English so you can do exchange knowledge about the Indonesian language, and they are so active in social media.
• Unlike Chinese, it has no tones.

Bahasa Indonesia has a lot of loan words from English. Most of these words are different in spelling, but similar in pronunciation. Here are some examples:

1. activist – aktivis
2. actor – aktor
3. class – kelas
4. design – desain
5. evacuation – evakuasi