Basic Indonesian Coursebook

Type: Workbook
Cost: $22 AUD
Audience: Some experience, preferably with a tutor


I bought this book at the Foreign Language Bookshop in Melbourne, and you can also get it at Book Depository with free shipping. I found out that I really should have bought a dictionary as well, because even though this book is promoted as an introductory coursebook suitable for self-study... they're lying.

Each chapter starts with a comic strip based around Sari and her daily life. It's quite well done, and there's a transcript as well so you don't have to go back to the pictures, but they do help with understanding meaning the first time. Then, there are questions based around the reading. Unfortunately, there is no translation of the questions (although at the back of the book there is a translation of all the comic strip dialogs), and worse, there are no answers! So if you don't have someone helping you, you could be going down completely the wrong track and would never know.

The lack of answers is my biggest complaint about this book, however the companion audio CD is a close second. I saw a review on Amazon of the book by someone who said the dialog on the CD was spoken far too quickly to understand. I don't know whether they were stupid or whether (I suspect) it actually was too fast, so they just slowed it down electronically rather than re-recording it. It really is ridiculous, the words are so distorted that you'd never get proper pronunciation from it. "CO...P...Y....WRRRR...ITE" It is so bad that I have tossed it. Luckily, there are transcripts of the audio lessons at the back of the book.

For all my criticism above, this is actually an amazingly useful book that has given me a number of "a-ha!" moments. It explains grammar in a plain language method that is easy to understand and put into context. For that reason alone, it's actually worth the money (it's really not that expensive). And the exercises are good, you just don't know whether you're doing it right or not. I suppose I could type the questions into Google Translate to check.

Finally, this book has one of the most interesting back-of-book dictionaries I've ever seen. Rather than the usual textbook index of the words encountered in the book, instead it takes 100 high-frequency English words and explains how to use them in different contexts in Indonesian.