“Subuh” in Indonesian refers to the dawn or pre-dawn time, used to indicate the early morning hours or the time just before sunrise. In Islamic…
Posts published in “Reading EN”
The term syukur originates from the Arabic word shukran (شكراً), meaning ‘thank you’. So, what sets it apart from terima kasih, the conventional Indonesian expression…
Numbers with decimal point and thousand separator |n numerous English-speaking nations, including former British and American colonies, a full-stop (period) is used to denote the…
“Speed bumps”, as they’re known in US English or more commonly referred as “road humps” or more colloquially “sleeping policemen” by speakers of British English,…
Indonesian or bahasa Indonesia, is an Austronesian language that has been used as a lingua franca in the multilingual Indonesian archipelago for centuries.
These are the six main colours in Indonesian: hitam (black), merah (red), hijau (green), biru (blue), putih (white) and kuning (yellow). Color also plays an…
What is the equivalent of the second person pronoun you in Indonesian? It turns out that there are a lot of answers to this question.…
At least for people speaking colloquial Indonesian, mau (normally pronounced mo) can be used both to express a desire (“want”) and also to express an intention (“will”). What is happening here? Can words just arbitrarily change their meaning?
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of speech. Articulation refers to the mechanics of makings sounds for speech. In formal Indonesian, a prefix me- that is used with transitive verbs is pronounced in different ways depending on what verb it attaches to.
A polyglot is someone who speaks a lot of languages. Some polyglots are linguists, and some linguists are polyglots. But I’m the kind of linguist who is not a polyglot. Language learning is not particularly easy or fun for me. It’s more of an occupational hazard than an end in itself.
When I talk to people about studying Indonesian in Jakarta, one of the most common responses is something like: “You know, what they teach you in the classroom is totally different from what you hear on the streets!”