1000 Most Common Indonesian Words.

Indonesian is one of the most welcoming languages a learner can choose. Verbs never change for person or tense, nouns have no plural ending and no gender, and the spelling is highly regular, so new words are easy to say. What takes practice is the way it builds words from roots, so that tulis, write, grows into menulis, ditulis, penulis and tulisan, and the everyday choice between standard and spoken Indonesian.

In the frequency data behind this book, a blend of subtitles, news, web pages and books, the 1,000 headwords account for an estimated 70.2% of word occurrences, and they come in the order that pays off fastest. Part One gives you the small words that do the work other languages do with endings: pronouns, time words like sudah and belum, prepositions and joining words. Part Two hands you about a hundred words for free, spelled like English or respelled the way they sound (informasi, universitas, komputer), along with the words the Portuguese traders and the Dutch left behind. Part Three is the rest, by everyday theme.

Every entry gives the word, its IPA and a plain-English respelling with the stressed syllable in capitals, and its meaning. Where a word belongs to a family, the entry names its root and closest relatives, and where you will hear a spoken form, nggak for tidak or udah for sudah, the entry gives it beside the standard word. Three example sentences follow, each glossed word by word beneath the Indonesian with a natural translation underneath. Each Part ends with a short test, with the answers at the back, and an alphabetical glossary lists every word in the book.