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strong>April 19, p2

Dozens of people from around the world were busy preparing food and beverages to sell on a hot Thursday at a university compound in Depok, while others tried to offer food in broken Indonesian.

'€œCome, buy our dishes, they are delicious,'€ said a Korean in Indonesian.

Some distance from the food stalls, a number of foreigners were anxious, looking at sheets of paper, murmuring, practicing speeches.

'€œI am a little bit nervous right now. This will be my first time giving a speech in Indonesian in front of a large crowd,'€ said Yushi Tanaka, a Japanese 41-year-old who has been studying Indonesian for a year.

Your comments:

Kudos to the writer of this article for using the phrase '€œIndonesian language'€ throughout this article.  I cringe every time I read or hear someone (99.9 percent of the time it is a foreigner) refer to the Indonesian language as bahasa!  

For those visitors or new arrivals in Indonesia who have not learned this yet: the word bahasa simply means '€œlanguage'€, as in any language, not exclusively the Indonesian language.

Gado

I recommend every foreigner living in Indonesia to learn the language. It is fun and rewarding. It is a way to understand the culture and can also be used in Malaysia.

Coming from a small European country, learning languages is nothing new. The more of them you know, the easier it becomes to learn a new one.

Indonesian is like English, very easy to get started. It becomes more complicated when you want to speak proper Indonesian.

Of course Indonesian will never become an International language, but if you live in Indonesia for years and never bother to learn the language, you miss out a lot.

PakMB

Recently, I'€™ve learned some Indonesian and expected to understand some traditional songs only to find I understood none because they were in Javanese.  

Even understanding English can be difficult because every nation has their own dialect.  If we expect perfect understanding all the time we could write everything out in Esperanto.  

Jim Harrigan

There will always be a handful of foreigners who will learn Indonesian.  

However it would be a great leap of faith to expect it will become a regional let alone an international language.  

Learning any foreign language requires great effort over many years. For this reason, English offers the greatest benefit because it is spoken everywhere even if just as a second language.

Jagera

Indonesian will be studied across the Southeast Asia people as the ASEAN Economic Community begins. Just watch!

Reubenstein

Some Indonesian words are known in the European Union.

But when in Indonesia, you should grasp the full meaning of korupsi, jam karet and pijat tradisional.

It is life changing sometime. I was in Indonesia, at around 14:00 local time when the taxi driver ask me whether I would like some ayam (Chicken, I guess).

So I said, being hungry as well, Ok pak, ayam bakar or? He said: No, no sir ayam cantik.

Gypsy