Indonesian easy or difficult?

I refer to the two interesting letters this month about whether or not Indonesian is an easy-to-learn language. I have lived here for a total of about 10 years (in three stints) and felt like writing about my experience.

If you are not in Jakarta, you learn Indonesian in no time because there is no alternative. Very few people can speak English even in other big cities like Surabaya or Semarang. So you either learn it or depend on an interpreter (and hope that he/she is really translating correctly what you are saying/hearing) or you return to your home ground.

In Jakarta, you don't have to learn Indonesian because a reasonably big proportion of Jakartans know English. Quite a few of them, in fact, prefer to polish their English by speaking to English-speaking foreigners.

Indonesian is one of the simplest languages as long as your objective is its "working knowledge" because (a) It uses Roman script, (b) It is not necessary to remember singular-plural forms, (c) Construction of sentences in active voice as well as passive voice is very simple. In fact you don't even need to use oleh in the passive construction, (d) You do not need to mug up the PPPs like you need to do in English, as in leave-left, deliver-delivered, speak-spoken, etc., (e) The verb does not change according to the subject (singular, plural, masculine, feminine etc.) or the tense of the sentence. In fact in how many languages would a word for both an elder brother and an elder sister be the same (like kakak in Indonesian)?

But there the simplicity ends. When you meet ke...an, pe...an, per...an etc., the meanings change in a major way. The vocabulary of Indonesian is as big and as difficult to remember as that of any other language. Of course the most difficult part in Indonesian is how to use the dictionary, because you have to learn to locate the root word first.

Although there are exceptions to prove the rule, I have generally seen that people who are born in countries where only English is spoken are used to others learning their language and therefore they hardly use their in-born faculty of learning additional languages and eventually lose it. Remember Darwin's law?

On the other hand, Indians who (like me) have to learn at least three languages (and sometimes end up learning four or five), have no hassles in learning the language of the state or country where they work and do so in a jiffy. In fact, I often feel that Indians are born with an additional language proficiency "genetic ship."

But I agree with the views expressed by the author of the first letter. I feel that living in Indonesia and not learning Indonesian borders on being impolite to the nice and polite Indonesians. In two of my three jobs, I have given friendly lessons in elementary Indonesian to my fellow expatriates (In the third, I was the only expatriate) and wouldn't mind doing it again. I have seen that it improves my English ...!

K.B. KALE

Jakarta