Читать книгу Instant Indonesian - Stuart Robson - Страница 7

Preface

A little language goes a long way!

It is a well-established fact that most people of average intelligence and education use a vocabulary of only five or six hundred words in going about their everyday affairs. The reason for this, of course, is that it is possible to express a variety of thoughts by using the same words in different combinations. Each additional word exponentially increases the number of thoughts one can express. Another obvious reason why a limited vocabulary is enough to get most people through the day is that they are primarily involved in basic situations that are repeated day after day.

The aim of this little book is to lay the foundation for expressing yourself in Indonesian. It will introduce 100 basic words that can be fitted together in a limited number of structures to form full sentences. Other common words are also listed, so that by substituting these in the appropriate places you will be able to say 1,000 things. And there are notes to help you when using this language in real situations.

English speakers will find it particularly easy to make basic sentences in Indonesian as the word order is generally the same as in English, there are no definite or indefinite articles or verb “to be,” and no complicated rules about changing the form of words to express singular and plural or the tense of verbs.