bahassa indonesian

I know to many of you the thought of me learning another language is quite ridiculous, I never exactly thrived as a linguist but just thought I’d share what I think are some interesting things about Bahassa Indonesian.

I do struggle at times with the exact language but I’m becoming much better and using less englonesian as my vocabulary widens, I actually often can’t say what I want so have to doctor it to what I can say. At times this does make you feel like you are a little bit stupid because you just can’t articulate your thoughts well enough. Also to the great amusement of my friends and colleagues I often mix up words such as nurse and aeroplane which are perawat and pesawat. There have been a number of occasions when I have asked is it the doctors or the aeroplanes who write the medical records. Although often my pronunciation is so bad they just have to guess anyway. No errors of mine have yet eclipsed a friend who used a English dictionary and missed translated and instead of asking ‘how do much English people get paid per month in england?’ and instead asked ‘how many penguins are you given per month?’ which I didn’t really know how to respond to.

Probabaly the two most widely used words in Indonesian are ‘Sudah’ and ‘Belum which mean already and not yet and have a whole range of uses. Bahassa Indonesian doesn’t have tenses (such as past present or future) so they are used to help add a time element. However the most common time they are used is someone asks if you are married (very important in indoensia, people are normally married by their early 20s although when I asked they never look surprised at the answer) the answers ‘no’ or ‘yes’ aren’t accepted, you have to say already or not yet. This gives so many elements of life this sort of numbingly inevitable feel! Rather oddly it’s a linguistical quirk which ends up rubbing off on you in English, so even when speaking English. For example if you ask any fellow volunteers or development workers ‘have you been to ____’ in English they will respond ‘not yet’ even if they have plans to compared to in England where if I asked someone if they’d ever been to Indonesia they would only say not yet if they had some sort of plan to. Or take marriage again, if you asked someone if they were married and they said not yet you would expect them to be engaged or at least have something in the pipeline. Imagine if you heard someone who was single saying to someone they were not yet married, that would be a little weird.

The other word abused by people here is Kasihan which means sort of pity. So if you told someone something really bad had happened to you they would respond with Kasihan which is sort of ‘I pity you’ or ‘poor you’. It is a sincerely meant comment of consolation. Unfortunately for all of us who aren’t from Indonesia, it really is just asking to be used sarcastically. In fact I am yet to hear a none Indonesian sincerely Kasihan someone. Actually being English and having sarcasm coursing through my veins even when I hear and Indonesian saying it I can’t hear it as anything but pure sarcasm!

There are many other quirks. Quite usefully there is an inclusive and exclusive version of we which is Kami or Kita. So you can not worry about accidently inviting someone to something and be mean and exclude people. SO basically it’s like little brackets in English so kami is we (not including the person you are talking to) and Kita is we (including the person you are talking to), it really is very useful.