21
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] jrubal1462@mander.xyz 1 points 6 hours ago

There's a good chance I'm not qualified to proclaim this opinion out loud, but this is the internet so...

I don't think Indonesian belongs in the yellow category. Indonesian has no tenses, no cases, nothing. Sure, there's little-to-no overlap in the vocab, but the structure of the language was so straightforward, that a month or 2 with the phrasebook was basically all that was required to survive in country. I wasn't having a lot of deep conversations in Indonesian, but one time I excused myself while squeezing past somebody on a plane, mistakenly giving him the impression that I was local, and ended up getting invited to his sister's house for dinner during Eid.

For context, I took 2 years of French in High School (where I took it more seriously than you'd think), and I took 3 courses of Russian in undergrad.

this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
21 points (100.0% liked)

Linguistics

2257 readers
15 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

  1. Instance rules apply.
  2. Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
  3. Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
  4. Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
  5. Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
  6. Have fun!

Related communities:

Resources:

Grammar Watch - contains descriptions of the grammars of multiple languages, from the whole world.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS