Comments on: Prokem, bahasa gaul, language inventiveness

By: Naomi

Naomi — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:03:02 +0000

Ah, I never noticed how complex Indonesian slang is until I tried to talk to the exchange students I met who spent, say, a year in Indonesia… their Indonesian sounded to formal that I had to laugh, and they didn’t understand anything I said…
Oh well, mau diapain lagi?

By: Chriswaterguy

Chriswaterguy — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:19:56 +0000

Great post! Jakarta would be especially challenging, but the main problem is that textbooks are usually awful and don’t reflect the language as it’s used.

A few Wikibooks pages I like (and have contributed to):

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_Learn_a_Language
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Indonesian/Adding_vocabulary_with_word_association
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Indonesian (far from complete, but has potential)

By: Hendy

Hendy — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:46:10 +0000

Interesting post. As far as I know, “mengapakan” is not a word. Or at least it’s not commonly used. The closest form should be “mengapa-apakan”.

There are a few ways of using the word “ngapain” like “Ngapain belajar?” (Why study?), “Lagi ngapain?” (What are you doing?), “Ngapain aja?” (What have you been doing?). Now that I think about it, it’s not so easy to explain. Interesting, huh?

By: Random Stuff that Matters » Blog Archive » Daily shared links - 02/27/2008

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:05:49 +0000

[...] Random Stuff that Matters » Blog Archive » Prokem, bahasa gaul …All this to say that I just came across a very interesting article about bahasa prokem (apparently prokem is derived from preman - the small crooks that … [...]