Tom Ritchford
2 min readDec 27, 2020

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Your reasoning is exactly why I learned Indonesian.

Before you flip out, Indonesian is one of the easiest languages ever. Only Spanish was easier for me.

Indonesian in particular has an elegant, easy-to-use grammar that just throws out all the hard parts.

Conjugation? No such thing. Plurals? Don't exist. Gender? Nope. The verb "to be"? No such thing!

Of course, you can still communicate these ideas. For example, "anak" means child. Two children are "dua anak". Usually you can guess by context whether a noun is plural or not, but if you need to say, "children", you say "anak-anak" - just repeat the word.

Many sentences like "Kedua anaknya sudah pergi ke toko" can be translated word-for-word - "Both of the children already went to [the] store".

Oh, and the pronunciation is easy.

The one slightly unusual thing above is that the "k" at the end of a word is pronounced as a "glottal stop" - that is ana' without a hard "k" but if you say "anaK" everyone will understand you. "Dua" is pronounced "doo-ah" just like you'd expect.

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Spanish is a beautiful, elegant language. It's not hard for an English speaker, and if you know another Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese, etc), it's even easier. And you're much more likely to be able to use it on a day-to-day basis than Indonesian, and there are a ton of materials to learn from.

If you started today and spent 30 minutes on it, every other day, by the end of 2021 you'd probably be B1. You'd be able to follow some Spanish language films, particularly from South America, where they speak more evenly.

You could start to watch Spanish films from Spain like Almodóvar (whose every film is a treasure) - his characters speak much faster and have a Castilliano accent ("th"s for some of the "s"s), but have simply gorgeous accents.

Consider it! :-)

Thanks for a great article.

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