In praise of the Indonesian language

First of all, I'm alive, and I did not feel the earthquake that you may have heard about in Indonesia recently. I learned about it on the Internet like everyone else. My father looked it up for me, and it was about 1500 miles away from Jakarta. But thanks to those of you who worried. On to more interesting things.

In the last couple of weeks, I've started Indonesian classes with some of the other expatriate teachers at IPEKA. We are a very small class, but we love our teacher, one of the school's Indonesian teachers, who does a great job preparing for the class and answering thousands of our questions. I can actually make some sentences now instead of just rattling off vocab words. I've been trying out some of my new conversational skills on students and colleagues, but they seem to find my speaking Indonesian incredibly funny, and more often than not, I send them into stitches. My favorite response was when one of my students said that I spoke Indonesian with a French accent.

In many ways, Indonesian is a delight to learn. It doesn't really have different verb tenses, you can really screw up syntax and still be understood, and its spelling is very phonetic. This means that you can look at a word and know how to pronounce it, and you can hear a word and know how to spell it. My favorite words are the ones that come from English but have had their spelling "Indonesianized." So in honor of the Indonesian language (and my puzzle-loving friends and family), I have a bit of a game for you: "What's the English counterpart of these Indonesian words?" I'll put a pronunciation guide and a word bank at the bottom to help you out.

Easy words
1. jus
2. restauran
3. doktor
4. taksi
5. kalculator
6. tomat
7. organisasi
8. institusi
9. konsep
10. tenis

Intermediate words:
1. tur
2. es krim (one of my favorites)
3. teh
4. saus
5. konser
6. stasiun
7. bir
8. mal
9. konteks
10. apel

Advanced:
1. pir
2. sains and (its counterpart) saintis
3. botol
4. coklat
5. fesyen
6. buku
7. porsi
8. kopi (hard one, sorry)
9. apotek (another hard one)
10. alpukat (this isn't the advanced section for nothing)

Pronunciation guidelines:
Consonants are almost all the same as English with these exceptions:
"c" = "ch" ("k" stands in for the hard "c" sound)
"sy" = "sh"
"r" is always rolled
Vowels remind me of Latin pronunciation but it's not quite the same:
"a" = "ah"
"e" = "eh" but frequently "uh" inside a word
"i" = "ee"
"o" = "oh"
"u" = "oo"

Word Bank:
Apothecary (more accurately pharmacy)
Apple
Avocado
Beer
Book
Bottle
Calculator
Chocolate
Coffee
Concept
Concert
Context
Doctor
Fashion
Ice cream
Institution
Juice
Mall
Organization
Pear
Police
Portion
Restaurant
Sauce
Science
Scientist
Station
Taxi
Tea
Tennis
Tomato
Tour

Hope you had fun.