I is for Indonesian

Making out in Indonesian. Constantine, Peter. (Tokyo : Yenbooks, 1994.)

I'm not too sure who the target audience is for the Making out in... series of phrase books. I remember flipping through Making out in Korean some years back in hopes of enlarging my arsenal, but it didn't really have any terms that I didn't know already. Most of the book wasn't devoted to obscenities anyway but to simple phrases like "I don't understand him" or "I must go know" that I learned in my first quarter of college Korean.

The Merde!/¡Mierda!/Scheisse!/etc. series, on the other hand, makes perfect sense to me. The books are solid introductions to slang and informal usage in their respective languages aimed at those who learned a formal register in school. But what's the point of studying slang if you don't even know the basics? Let's see what the author has to say:

This brand of Indonesian is simple and direct. It is spoken mainly in Jakarta but is understood anywhere in Indonesia. It has shed the grammatical twists and turns of the highly formal language that textbooks and language courses strive so hard to teach. In fact, foreigners who roam the streets of Jakarta with big grammars and heavy dictionaries find they get nowhere.

Is anyone else's bullshit detector meeping furiously? The author goes to say that his book "will teach everything anyone needs to know about plain-spoken everyday language".

Apparently, that's not much, as this is an 87-page with rarely more than 30 Indonesian words per page. I'm trying to imagine how a foreigner might sound repeating a few stock phrases from a short intro to simplified, slangy London vernacular and just cringing. Worse, there's no real assurance that Constantine knows what the hell he's talking about. He's Austrian, after all, and no native Indonesian speakers are credited. So where did he find his stuff?

How did I come to own such a book? One of my co-workers made a stab at learning Indonesian some years back and, apparently, recently concluded that he was never going to do much with the materials he'd accumulated. Knowing what a language freak I was, he offered them to me. I accepted, thinking we were talking two or three texts at most. It turned out to be more like nine or ten. Since I already have the comprehensive grammar published by Routledge and the Echols/Shadily two-volume dictionary set, I don't really need any of them, but I guess it's up to me to find them better homes.

You'd think that those high-quality titles of mine would be an indication of a deep interest in Indonesian, but you'd be wrong. It was a combination of curiosity and cheapness that put them into my hands, and they haven't spent much time there. Frankly, I find the language very bland. The optimist in me says I just have yet to uncover the interesting bits, but the child in me isn't inclined to waste time looking for them when there's still Basque and Osage to pick up.

Ready for some sample phrases?

Lu tapu siapa gua? Do you know who I am?
Gua sepak biji lu! I kick your testicles!
Gua benar-benar ngerti. I understand very well.
Aku nggak suka pakai kondom. I don't like to wear a condom.
Pegi sana! Go away!