How to learn Indonesian by reading

Indonesian is often described as one of the most approachable languages for English speakers. It uses the Latin alphabet with regular spelling, verbs don’t change for tense or person, nouns have no gender, and plurals are often left unmarked. Saya makan, dia makan, mereka makan means “I eat,” “she eats,” “they eat,” and the same words can mean “ate.”

It’s also a language with a remarkable job. Indonesian, a standardized form of Malay, is the national language of a country of thousands of islands and hundreds of local languages, the shared language of schools, newspapers and books. Its literature includes Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels of colonial Java, the poetry of Chairil Anwar, and contemporary writers such as Eka Kurniawan and Andrea Hirata.

What makes Indonesian hard to read

• Prefixes and suffixes. Indonesian builds words from a root with affixes, each changing the meaning in a regular way. From baca, “read,” come membaca (to read), dibaca (is read), terbaca (legible, or read by accident), pembaca (reader) and bacaan (reading matter).
• Roots that change their first sound. The prefix meN- blends with the root: tulis becomes menulis (to write), pukul becomes memukul (to hit), sapu becomes menyapu (to sweep), kirim becomes mengirim (to send). Sometimes the root’s first letter disappears, so finding the root is a skill in itself.
• The passive everywhere. Indonesian uses the passive far more than English, especially in narrative: Buku itu dibaca oleh Ani, “the book was read by Ani.” Stories often focus on what happens to things rather than who did it.
• Doubling. Repeating a word makes it plural or changes its meaning: anak-anak (children), jalan-jalan (to stroll, from jalan, “road, walk”), bertahun-tahun (for years).
• Time without tenses. Sudah (already), sedang (in the middle of), akan (will) and belum (not yet) do the work that tenses do in English. Often there’s no marker at all.
• Formal and everyday Indonesian. Books use the standard language, but dialogue in modern fiction may switch to everyday speech, especially Jakarta’s: gue and lo for “I” and “you,” nggak for “no,” udah for sudah.
• Pronouns and politeness. Saya is the polite “I” and aku the familiar one; Anda is a formal “you” and kamu an everyday one. People are often addressed as Bapak (sir) or Ibu (madam) instead of “you,” and dialogue in novels shifts between these forms to show who is close to whom.
• Old spellings. Spelling reforms in 1947 and 1972 changed oe to u and dj to j, among other things, so older texts and many names look different: Soekarno and Sukarno are the same man.
• Words from everywhere. Centuries of trade left their mark: bahasa (language) comes from Sanskrit, kitab (a holy or classical book) from Arabic, kantor (office) from Dutch, and sepatu (shoe) and meja (table) from Portuguese.

Indonesian reading at each level

How the CEFR levels look in Indonesian text:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences with everyday roots, the most common prefixes (ber-, meN-), classifiers like seorang and sebuah, and simple time words.
• B1, intermediate. The passive with di-, the suffixes -kan and -i, relative clauses with yang, and longer sentences joined with karena, ketika and meskipun.
• B2, upper intermediate. Stacked affixes (memperhatikan, “to pay attention to,” from hati, “heart”), nouns formed with ke-…-an, peN-…-an and per-…-an, and a more literary vocabulary.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, with some passages condensed. C2 is the complete novel.

New to the CEFR? Start with CEFR levels explained.

The Swiss Family Robinson at A2 and at B2

A shipwrecked family making a home on a tropical island, written for this page at two levels:

A2

Kapal keluarga itu karam di tengah badai. Ayah, ibu, dan keempat anak laki-laki mereka selamat. Mereka sampai di sebuah pulau yang indah.

The family’s ship was wrecked in the middle of a storm. The father, the mother and their four sons survived. They reached a beautiful island.

B2

Dengan memanfaatkan barang-barang yang diselamatkan dari kapal, keluarga itu membangun rumah di atas pohon raksasa agar terlindung dari binatang buas pada malam hari.

Using the things they had saved from the ship, the family built a house high in a giant tree, to be safe from wild animals at night.

The A2 text has no tense markers at all; the story makes the past clear. It uses the classifier sebuah (“a,” for things) and yang to attach an adjective (pulau yang indah, “an island that is beautiful”). The B2 sentence is built from affixes: memanfaatkan (meN- + manfaat, “benefit,” + -kan: “to make use of”), diselamatkan (di- + selamat, “safe,” + -kan: “rescued, saved”), membangun (“to build,” from bangun) and terlindung (“protected”). Barang-barang doubles barang, “thing,” to make it plural.

A reading habit for Indonesian, step by step

1. Start with the audio on. Let the narrator read a section while you follow the highlight across the page. Indonesian spelling is regular, with one well-known gap: the letter e stands for two vowels, as in sepatu and meja. The audio settles those, and teaches rhythm and the sound of everyday dialogue.
2. Find the root. When a long word stops you, strip off the prefix and suffix and look for the root. You’ll often know it already.
3. Tap only what blocks you. If you can follow the sentence, keep going. Affixes become familiar by repetition.
4. Reread. The same handful of affixes comes back on every page, and a second reading is where they click.

The principles of extensive reading, set out by Day and Bamford (1998, Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom), suit Indonesian well: easy material, lots of it, chosen for pleasure. Because Indonesian builds so much from a limited stock of roots and affixes, reading many easy pages teaches you to recognize word families at a glance. See also comprehensible input, reading while listening and dictionary or context.

Classics to start with

• The Swiss Family Robinson is full of practical vocabulary for building, cooking, fishing and exploring on a tropical island. Ideal at A2 and B1.
• Robinson Crusoe is the original castaway story: concrete, steady and easy to follow at A2 or B1.
• Treasure Island is fast and full of dialogue, a good first novel.
• The Jungle Book is vivid and episodic, with animals, forests and rivers, at B1.
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea fills your vocabulary with the ocean, at B1 or B2.

How Lexo helps with Indonesian

Indonesian builds long words from short roots, and Lexo’s word card undoes the building for you. Tap a word and you see its meaning in that sentence, its base form and its part of speech, so a word like diselamatkan stops being a puzzle. If the word is part of a phrase or idiom, that’s explained too, along with a translation of the sentence into English, and you can keep any word in your Words list.

Every word can be played on its own, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word as it’s read. There’s also a sentence-by-sentence mode, which shows one sentence at a time with its audio and translation.

Choose any level from A2 to C2 for each book. If you’re the first to ask for a book in Indonesian at your level, Lexo writes the edition for you: chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes, the app can notify you when it is, the rest follows while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. Books download for offline reading on iPhone and iPad, and there’s no account to create.

Lexo also offers Malay, Indonesian’s sister standard. Among our other guides, its nearest relative is Filipino, another Austronesian language. For two more languages of Southeast Asia, see Vietnamese and Thai.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.