Instant Indonesian: How to Express 1,000 Different Ideas with Just 100 Key Words and Phrases! (Indonesian Phrasebook) (Instant Phrasebook Series)

I have a lot of experience learning various foreign languages. Indonesian fascinates me and I would love to become fluent, but I have to be realistic and admit that I just don't have time to do that! I have other languages that I am working on becoming completely fluent in, and which are more practical for me in my situation than Indonesian is. Yet I love Indonesian. I have studied it here and there before, but had trouble remembering the vocabulary and being able to put it together. This book is set up beautifully to help you grasp the vocabulary and get a very good idea of how to use it in different situations. Each chapter presents 10 head words to learn. For example, the first word is Selamat, which is a greeting. But in addition to just learning that main word, you learn how to use it in various situations, and so you end up learning a lot more than the 10 main words, and it seems almost effortless. So you learn Selamat Pagi, (Good Morning), Selamat Jalan (Have a good trip), and so on. There is only one thing that makes me give this book 4 stars instead of 5. And that is that it doesn't show you which syllable receives the stress. But if you listen to a couple youtube videos on Indonesian, you kind of pick up on the general sounds of it and it starts to come naturally. But I wish it would show you for each word where to accent it. But otherwise, it's excellent.

I am an Indonesian married to an Iowan. I brought my then-girlfriend to Indonesia in 2008 to meet my family just before we got engaged. She had major trouble with the language barrier because I am a terrible translator. When we went to Bali, we got a non-English speaking tour guide (he specialized in Japanese) so my wife enjoyment of this trip was lessened. I understood everything fine, but I translate with inaccurate non-sense. She's been wanting to learn Indonesian for quite sometime, but I am an even worse teacher. I bought her Rosetta Stone, and it didn't really work but not that it's not a good product but it just wasn't for her (I tried Spanish with the software too and I gave up). This book is amazing for the fact she's read it in 2 days only now (today is 08/25/11) and I am very impressed with her pronunciation (improved amazingly) already because on the 2nd or 3rd page or somewhere close to the front there is a list of how to pronounce the letters in the alphabet in Indonesian. Lots of things I wouldn't even think of teaching her if I was to, like "Jam berapa?" -means "What time is it?" flip-flopped to "Berapa jam?" -means "How many hours?". This book is recommended for anybody traveling to Indonesia or planning on moving there. My cousin recently got married with one of my best friends from Iowa and I think I'm gonna buy him one too. Oh, and my wife feel bad for calling my Mom by her first name the first time she met her (and she never had until she read a passage and I never really thought about it either), and it's pointed out in this book that you have to address anyone that's older than you with some kind of a title.

While it does teach many useful phrases, I gave this book 4 stars because of its inferiority to the Lonely Planet (LP) equivalent. Instant Indonesian has a brief dictionary in the back, but it is severely lacking. Fine, it's not advertised as a dictionary--but compared to the Lonely Planet Indonesian Phrasebook & Dictionary, it doesn't stand up to par.For example, Instant Indonesian has a table of contents in the front, from which you can direct yourself to what you want to talk about (e.g. greetings or shopping). On the other hand, LP has the table of contents and colored page edges, so you can immediately flip to whatever topic you want straight-away. As I recall, LP had more (and more practical) phrases as well. I specifically remember not using my Instant Indonesian book nearly as much as I had anticipated because of its difficulty to find the appropriate phrase (either because it was difficult or too time consuming to locate the phrase, or because it didn't have the phrase I wanted). Though in all fairness I don't own the LP version (a friend had it), so I have no clue if I *actually* would have used it more than the Instant Indonesian.Overall, I think Instant Indonesian is a good book that does what it promises, but would recommend the LP version over it.

This book is well worth the money I paid for it. Don't be misled by the title of the book, it teaches you a lot more than 100 words in Indonesian! It takes a stepping stone approach that is quite easy to grasp and provides plenty of examples of how words are used. I find the examples really helpful in understanding how words are used and reinforcing meaning. Also there are numerous cultural notes within the book which are interesting and helpful. My only gripe with the book is the order of the chapters - it seems to be counterintuitive (for example you don't learn subject pronouns until halfway through the book and simple greetings aren't covered adequately at the beginning). Now, I understand this is supposedly done because of the way the language is structured, but speaking as someone who has learned 4 languages as an adult, I can tell you there are much better ways of structuring a language learning book. That aside, I think it's a great book to get you started and much better than a lot of what's out there.

Does exactly what it says... teaches you enough Indonesian to have a conversation instantly. I went to Bali without knowing a single word but was quickly confident greeting people and even able to have a short conversation with them within days of downloading this book. I can't recommend it highly enough!

Pocket sized reference book with useful bits.

Very basic and it shouldn't take long to complete!

This book does what it says - basic words, used in simple sentences that are genuinely useful. Once these 100 words are known, many sentences can be constructed and this book shows you how.

Pretty good actually.I've used the printed version and now have it on Kindle also.Generally useful words and phrases.