Learning a New Language

I am trying to learn some Bahasa Indonesia in preparation for visiting our son and family.  "Trying" is the operative word.  My goodness, I used to be quite good at learning languages but this one has me flummoxed.  I learned Spanish in high school.  Became fairly fluent in German while stationed in Germany.  Actually became pretty fluent in French while we lived in Morocco.  But I've never attempted a language like this one.

Perhaps it's the fact that the other languages I've tackled all had some words in them that were similar to English words.  After all, many of our words have their roots in the Romance languages and certainly in German.  The vocabulary wasn't coming at me totally out of the blue, so to speak.  When in doubt, I could sometimes guess based on visual clues or oral clues.  However, when it comes to Bahasa Indonesia, there isn't anything in it that is remotely familiar.

I have, however, found a wonderful resource for studying the language.  Learning Indonesian is a website that has online lessons that you can listen to on your computer or download and listen to in the form of podcasts.  The lessons are short and they aren't overwhelming.

The website is also linked to another website called "Quizlet" which lets you print up flash cards for each lesson.  You don't have to prepare these flash cards yourself.  The folks at Learning Indonesian have already done the work for you.  How great is that?  I've explored around the Quizlet site a bit and it is a great resource for many different fields of study.  For example, I just took a quick quiz on state capitals (failed miserably).  No matter what you are studying, this website has flash card sets that will help you.  

I've got awhile before I plan to head over to Jakarta so I'm hoping that I'll have a few words learned by then. In the meantime, Sampai Nanti!