Things to say.

Everything here obeys the rules in grammar/ and uses only words in the dictionary. check.py tests every line on this page along with the lessons.

Lesson 1 gets you five of the eight lines in the first section — Hi!, Salam!, Ok?, Ya, ok. and Bai!. The two greetings for a time of day wait for Lesson 03, and the last line, “I’ll come again”, waits for Lesson 16, which is where tena is taught. The rest of the page draws on the whole course; its last word arrives in Lesson 25. Read it for what you can use now rather than as a test of what you have finished.

That paragraph said “if you have read Lesson 1 you can already say the first section” until September 6, 2026. Six of the seven roots in that section are taught after Lesson 01 and one of them fifteen lessons after it, so the claim was out by more than half the course. Both figures are computed from the lessons now, the way the reading ladder is.

Saying it

A phrasebook is for saying things to somebody, so three facts before the phrases. All three were settled rather than guessed, and none has an exception.

Every letter has one sound and keeps it. c is the ch of chai; g is always hard; s is always the s of sun, never a z. Nothing is silent. The full table.

The beat is on the second-to-last syllable, always. SA-lam, PA-gi, AK-sam, a-ma-DU-nia. A one-syllable word — hi, ok, ya, bai — has nowhere else to put it. A vowel pair counts as one syllable, so bai is one beat and dunia is two. The rule.

Unstressed vowels do not change. The a of salam is the same a in both syllables. This is how Indonesian, Swahili and Japanese work, and not how English does — do not let an unstressed vowel slide toward uh.

Hello and goodbye

Meeting someone

Please, thank you, sorry

Asking the way

Buying

Eating and drinking

Time

If something is wrong

Small talk

Twenty words that will get you a long way

hi · salam · plis · mersi · pardon · ya · no · ok · bas · madad · mi · yu · es · mau · go · lai · nali · berapa · harga · bai

With these and a pointing finger you can cross a city.

What this page could not say

A phrasebook is a hard test, because it is made of the things people actually say rather than the things a grammar has got round to. Four gaps showed up immediately, and a fifth was found later by reading this page against the lessons:

• No word for “very”. Thank you very much and this is very good both had to lose the “very”. cok means “much” and whether it can carry “very” is undecided.
• Almost every line is a fragment. Sasa. Besok. Corba, plis. Madad! That is what a phrasebook is, and as of September 3, 2026 the grammar covers it: any constituent may stand alone as an utterance.
• Half the directions are commands — Anda tarik ini, Go yamin — and they are now granted: a verb with no subject is a command. Neither line changed; the rule caught up with them.
• The clock cannot be asked. Berapa hora is “how many hours”, not “what time”; the language has no word for a clock or an hour of the day.
• Pain cannot be said. Sar mi garam is “my head is hot”, which is the nearest a traveller gets to my head hurts. This page glossed it as my head hurts until September 4, 2026 — translating around a gap the repository had already recorded, which is the one thing a phrasebook must not do. The gloss says what the words say now, and the missing word is on the list.

Nothing was invented to paper over any of them. Four checks in check.py also caught four copula slips in the first draft of this page — es in front of an adjective, the same mistake the lessons made thirteen times.

Mi ama dunia. Yu ama dunia. Kita ama dunia.