My first paid job as an Indonesian tutor was teaching a young Chinese lady married to an Indonesian businessman. They spoke Chinese with each other. But, he wanted her to run a business together and thus wished her to be able to communicate with his employees. I was such an idealistic teacher. I taught her the most elegant, and standardized, Indonesian. I taught her to use all those complicated suffixes and prefixes to the letter. After a few weeks, she complained. She said that her employees noted that those "me", "meng", "kan" and so on are unnecessary. They even said that her Indonesian sounded funny.

Part of me was torn, because getting paid to eventually make my student sound funny was nightmare. On the other hand, I couldn't help but admit that her employees were right. 

Casual and formal Indonesian language vary in vocabularies, grammar structure, and intonation. I have compiled this video above for you to get a picture of how different it is. The first video is a clip of a podcast produced by a renowned TV station in Indonesia. The full video is here: https://bit.ly/3XMvZGU It's taken in a casual setting. We see that:

Kalau becomes kalo.

Simpan becomes simpen.

Pakai becomes pake.

Taruh becomes taro.

etc.

Then,

dikenai becomes dikenain (with an 'n')

dimasukkan becomes dimasukin.

The man sitting in the middle in the first clip is an Iranian. Only by listening to one sentence from his mouth, you can tell he is not someone who was born and grew up in Indonesia. However, his Indonesian sounded very natural. If I could make my student I mentioned previously speak Indonesian like him, her employees would surely be impressed instead of calling her funny.

And yet, if we, in school, had written our "bahasa Indonesia" assignment with words and structure like these people were using for the podcast, we would be guaranteed one thing: Fail. 

The second clip is a speech by someone who was born in Germany, and spent childhood outside Indonesia. She is half German and half Indonesian. She was making her speech in front of the elite members of the government. Hence, the bahasa Indonesia just like I had been taught in school. The full video is here: https://bit.ly/3Bvfd7z Did you notice that she never used suffixes like "... in" or the word "nggak"? However, she, too, at her first sentence, you can already sense she is not a local-born Indonesian. And yet, she, too, sounded very natural. 

In conclusion, the Iranian gentleman spoke natural casual Indonesian, and the German lady spoke natural formal Indonesian. Try to listen to them once more. Don't they sound like speaking two different languages?

Come, join my class on "Casual Indonesian" here https://bit.ly/4dAq4ut and then we'll practice speaking Bahasa Indonesia like a local. On the other hand, if you are preparing for a speech, or a presentation, feel free to sign up on my "Delivering a Speech or Presentation in Indonesian" Lesson here https://bit.ly/3BlvrA8 .

I hope to see you in class!