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Comment by alephnan | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of people say they know hundreds of foreign workers who come over here and speak Malay in two or three months and they don't turn into a celebrity

Can you really speak a language sufficiently well in 3 months, especially when you are there to work on something potentially unrelated to language ?

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My mother's family are from Malaysia (from the Terengganu mention in the article) and I've been told by a couple of people there that Malay is a pretty easy language to pick up and that foreigners can learn it pretty quickly.

Yes, Bahasa can be learned very, very quickly, it uses the Latin alphabet, words are written how they are spoken and vice-versa, verbs are never conjugated nor do they have tenses and the grammar is simple (e.g. plurals are created by simply doubling the words, like rumah, house, becomes rumah-rumah, houses, which in written form is abbreviated to rumah²).

My father used to joke you can learn Bahasa in three weeks, English in three months, and German in three years.

I've no clue about the Terengganu dialect, though.

It's my third language, and I've never needed it professionally, so I whatever I've said may not be 100% accurate...

Source: Am half Malay, lived there for nine years, around the KL area.

People called any malay or Indonesian language "bahasa" really bother me, bahasa means language, so if you tell people "i speak in bahasa", literally translated to "i speak in language", sounds really weird to me

I've often heard locals refer it to nothing more than "Bahasa", but yes, correctly you'd have to say "Bahasa Malaysia" or "Bahasa Indonesia", which can get umbrellad to "Bahasa Melayu", but that then sometimes offends the Indonesians, so I'm sticking to "Bahasa". My previous comment is valid for both.

Since we're nitpicking: People calling any Malay or Indonesian language "Bahasa" really bothers me, Bahasa means language, so if you tell people "I speak Bahasa", literally translated to "I speak language", it/that sounds really weird to me. (Personally, I find that beautiful. If nothing else is specified, it "defaults" to itself, how awesome is that?)

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