The starting point to learning the Indonesian bahsasa (“language”) is the alphabet. The great news is that it uses the same 26 characters as English and words are pronounced quite phonetically so you can quickly get a feel for how words should sound.
There’s a few key letters you need to understand:
- Vowels. Some of the vowels actually sound like different vowels in English.
- C. This sounds totally different to English (it sound like church so if you forget people will probably have no idea what you’ve just said..
- E. This letter typically sounds like A (ie day) but what I’ve observed is that when E is used in the first syllable it is used more like we would in English (e.g. pet)
- R. This is by far the hardest to pronounce as you need to start learning to roll your Rs from a very young age. Our expat two-year-old daughter is the only one in our family who can do it properly!
How to pronounce the Indonesian alphabet
A – ah
B – bey / bay
C – che
D – dey / day
E – A
F – ef
G – gey
H – hah
I – ee
J – jey / jay
K – car
L – el
M – em
N – en
O – oh
P – pey / pay
Q – key / keay
R – arrrrrr
S – es
T – te
U – oo
V – vey / vay
W – wey
X – ix
Y – yey / yay
Z – zed