Learn Indonesian to conversational in five months
Indonesian is one of the friendliest languages an English speaker can pick up: Latin alphabet, phonetic spelling, no verb conjugation, no tenses, no gender. Five months at about an hour a day gets you to everyday conversation. The hard part comes later — the gap between textbook Indonesian and the slangy Jakarta speech you'll actually hear.
5 months · ~150 hours · chat for 20 minutes with a tutor about your life, plans and opinions
1.Pimsleur Indonesian, Level 1
Thirty half-hour audio lessons that make you say things out loud from the first minute. Pimsleur only made one level of Indonesian, which is exactly enough: it fixes your pronunciation, gets the core sentence patterns into your mouth, and teaches you to answer without translating in your head. Do one lesson a day, repeat any lesson where you got less than 80% of the prompts.
Subscription, roughly $20/month; you need one to two months
Pimsleur Indonesian →2.Sahabatku Indonesia (BIPA 1–3)
The Indonesian Ministry of Education publishes a full textbook series for foreign learners, Sahabatku Indonesia, mapped to CEFR levels A1 through C2, and gives it away as PDFs. Work through the A1, A2 and B1 books in order. They are written in Indonesian with little English, which feels hard for two weeks and then becomes the reason they work. Keep a notebook of the affixes — me-, ber-, di-, -kan, -i — because that system is the real grammar of the language.
Free PDFs from the Ministry's BIPA portal
BIPA portal (Kemendikdasmen) →3.italki — community tutor
From month two, book three 30-minute conversation lessons a week. Indonesian tutors are among the cheapest on the platform. Ask your tutor to speak bahasa sehari-hari — everyday colloquial Indonesian, with gue, nggak and udah — for the second half of each session, because textbook Indonesian alone will leave you lost in a Jakarta café. Stay with one tutor long enough that they notice your recurring mistakes.
~$6–15/hour, pay per lesson
italki Indonesian tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you're moving to Bali or Jakarta and can study in person, skip steps 1 and 2 and enroll in a BIPA course at a local university or language school for a term. Classroom hours plus daily life will outpace any self-study plan. If you only need Malay for Malaysia, this path still mostly works, but switch tutors to Malaysian ones — vocabulary diverges more than you'd expect.
Why this path
Indonesian's simple grammar tempts people to stay on apps forever, collecting vocabulary without ever speaking. The real difficulties are listening speed, affixes and register, and none of those yield to flashcards. Pimsleur gives you a working mouth fast, the Ministry's textbooks give you the affix system and real Indonesian texts for free, and tutors give you the colloquial language no book teaches. Indonesian is the rare language where five months of honest work buys genuine conversation.