Customer Reviews

Bahasa Indonesia Book 1: Introduction to Indonesian Language and Culture (Bk.1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is ideal for the absolute beginner who wants a systematic introduction to the Indonesian language without overload. The 18 chapters are carefully structured so that each text can be understood with the words and grammar that have been covered up to that point. There are lots of exercises involving word substition that help the student to gain fluency. (I found this very useful, as I was learning on my own without a teacher.) After you have completed the book you are able to ask questions, tell the time, and say a lot else besides, and you get a good grounding in grammar including, for example, the object focus (kind of passive, very often used in Indonesian) which will stand you in good stead later. By the very nature of the book, the quantity of vocabulary covered is not overwhelming, but there is a 24 page Indonesian to English mini-dictionary at the back, and the second book (Bahasa Indonesia : Book 2 : Introduction to Indonesian Language and Culture) makes up for this deficit.

this book has a good amount of vocabulary and gives good explainations for every exercise. sometimes, infact you feel like you're reading the same thing over and over. the only problems i have are, there are no answers for the homework problems which consist of ten questions per chapter in addition to the regular exercises, the other is that i have not yet been able to find the tapes which would be a good accompaniment to the text. so far, though, i like what i've seen.

This is a great, inexpensive book for Indonesian. I was hoping for a it more about Indonesian because of the title, but it is still very good. I DO miss any audio supplements for the text.

The text is easy to read, I do find my self flipping through the text to earlier parts because sometimes the words you learn are not carried through all the lessons. Maybe my problem, not the books.

The text seems to be natural. There are not a lot of "stutter sentences" I have seen in many language books.

I like it alot.

No pretenses are made that this book is written for the serious student. If you are just looking to spend a few weeks in Bali and want to pick up some phrases to get by, this is not the language book for you. There is in fact very little material in the book that would be useful to the average tourist. The goal of this book is to help the motivated student build a strong foundation in Indonesian grammar. It is assumed that you will read more on your own as your understanding of the grammatical structure of the Indonesian language enables you to do so. Vocabulary will therefore be built by repeatedly referring to dictionaries.

What I like most about the book is its step wise towards helping students master increasingly complicated sentence structures. I took the author's advice to heart and mastered the material page by page. As I look back, I am actually surprised at how far I have come from where I had begun. Even though you probably cannot read an article from say [...] without painfully looking up the majority of the words from a dictionary after finishing book one, it becomes possible to do so whereas it would have been very unlikely for those who have not been introduced to the Indonesian language to get the sense of what the text in any news article says.

It is a great text for those who care to make the long journey.

I'm really satisfied with this book! After three months of self-study, I was already able to communicate about everyday life issues in Bahasa Indonesia!
It's well articulated and well done, really! You shouldn't miss this book!
A+!

Most language learning books are quite similar. No one writing a book is going to make a breakthrough in teaching a foreign language. The trick is to write a book in a way that the reader will be interested and will not give up. The format of this wook is exactly that. It tells short stories in every chapter. Readers are naturally intrigued about what will happen next, so if the book is written well, readers will keep on going. An interesting story will also make it easier to remember the vocabulary, as it creates easier associations in the learner's mind. An interesting thread stays longer in someone's mind, so that it makes it easier to retrieve a particular sentence. The book does not overburden the reader with grammar explanations. Grammar explanations are necessary indeed, but they should never surpass the story or conversational section. The natural way of learning does not involve understanding why things are said one way or another, although the adult's mind tends to always want to understand "why." The natural way or acquiring a language, however, takes about 7 years of constant exposure. In order to accelerate this, memorization techniques and grammatical explanations are commonly used as tools to teach a language. As these tools are artificial, it is best to reduce them to the minimum level. This book follows quite well the above precepts and allows the learner to immerse himself in a story and start acquiring the language.

I haven't completed the book, but I have started it without the audio supplement (which Amazon does not sell, and I cannot find anywhere anyway).

It's set up as a course, with tons of vocabulary in every chapter. Very meaty, with good drills. Not set up as a phrase book, and the appendix dictionary is only Behasa Indonesia to English.

Many drills, and they are indeed good exercises, but I would really like to see this book come with an appendix of tables for the various prefixes. Instead, such tables can only be found in the appropriate lesson chapters.

So far, this is the best Behasa Indonesia language course I've found. I find it handy to have a supplemental dictionary with this.

This book has a wealth of information in it, and I am sure I will learn a great deal of bahasa indonesia with it, however I feel as though the organization in the book is lacking. The vocabulary is spilled at you at the beginning of each chapter and sometimes the words are somewhat related to a common theme but more often than not they are not. The book has many of the words in Indonesian in the back with a glossary which only goes from Indonesian-English. However there are many words that the book uses which are not in the back, leaving the learner clueless as to what they mean without having the aid of a dictionary. I feel that a grammar book should include all the words it uses in the back in a glossary from the language to English and vice versa ESPECIALLY with a language with such long and interesting spellings as many of the words in bahasa indonesia have. If you are willing to work with the style (which I don't particularly care for) I think you will learn though. PLUS remember there aren't very many other choices out there for you outside of this and TY Indonesian. This book is a standard in many universities for Indonesian programs around the world, so it does deserve credit. I will continue using it since I don't have much else from which to choose. I think with a good dictionary and a little work to organize the topics in such a way that you learn better from it this book would be much better than it is as is.

As with the first order, the book came in new condition and is easy to use.