Lessons
Your Next Lesson
Thank You in Indonesian
Throwback Thursday
Learn the most common way to say "thank you"
Study now
Vocabulary
My Teacher
My Teacher Messenger My Assessment Test My Report
More
Start Your
Free Trial

Start Learning Indonesian in the next 30 Seconds with
a Free Lifetime Account

Or sign up using Facebook
By clicking Join Now, you agree to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and to receive our email communications, which you may opt out at any time.

Indonesian Grammar

For many people who dream of learning Indonesian, a fear of trying to learn and grasp all of the Indonesian grammar takes hold. They have memories of learning English grammar, and they remember that they didn’t have a great time trying to learn all of the rules. Fortunately, learning a language today doesn’t have to be such a dismal prospect. You can learn Indonesian and all of the grammar rules by sticking to the basics in the beginning. Knowing just the basics is going to help you learn the language basics, and you will then be able to expand your knowledge of grammar as you experience and understand more of the language and proper indonesian pronunciation.

Sentence Structure

You will find that the word order for sentences in the Indonesian language is going to be very similar to the sentence construction in English. They follow the same subject-verb-object order, and this similarity is definitely a good thing for any English speaker who wants to learn the language.

Tenses in Indonesian Grammar

One of the interesting things about the Indonesian verbs is that they are not going to change depending on the tense. To show the past or future tense, you will only have to add words that indicate the time. They do not have imperfect tense. Rather, they use duration words such as “selama”, which means during or as long as. This is quite a bit different from English, which is going to have different forms of verbs based on the tense. However, once you learn the Indonesian system, you will find that it is actually easy to employ.

Stressing

Because the language has quite a bit of expression to it. Even though the language uses the same sentence order as English in most cases, it is possible to change the location of the words in the sentences and have the sentence retain the same basic meaning. By changing the location of words, you will add stress or emphasis to those words and they become the focus of the sentence. Many speakers in the country speak this way. Do not worry about the ability to change sentence structure. If you stick to the SVO sentence construction in Indonesian grammar, you will not have any problems.

Learning grammar can take time, but it is vital for those who truly want to understand the language and to be able to communicate with native speakers.