JAKARTA SURVIVAL GUIDE: Talking to your ojek app driver and other essential Indonesian language for getting around

Whether you’re a tourist or a new resident, our Jakarta Survival Guide series will help you navigate the Indonesian capital’s chaos while having fun at the same time.  This installment features the essential Indonesian language basics you need to get around the capital in the 21st century (yes, we’ll help you understand what your online ojek driver is trying to ask you!).

And don’t forget to check out the first in this series on essential apps for your time in Jakarta.

Learning Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) is a fast track to the heart of Indonesian culture. The language captures the friendly spirit, sociable character and particular sense of time of the Indonesian people and it will help you understand their culture a lot better. Indonesians really appreciate when foreigners make an effort to learn their language and it will open lots of doors quickly.

Plus, the basics are easy to pick up quickly. Tenses and plurals are simple and there’s no masculine and feminine. Bagus ya? (‘Great, isn’t it?’)

PRONUNCIATION 101

Bahasa Indonesia uses the Roman alphabet but some of the letters are pronounced quite differently from English:

• ‘E’ is pronounced like a short ‘eh’, e.g. selamat (seh-lah-maht)
• ‘C’ is pronounced as ‘ch’, e.g. Cikini (chi-ki-ni)
• ‘G’ is always hard, e.g. pagi (pah-gee not pah-jee)
• ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘oo’, e.g. universitas (oo-ni-vers-i-tass)
• ‘S’ is pronounced ‘ss’ and never like ‘z’, e.g. permisi (per-mi-see)
• ‘R’ is rolled.

GREETINGS AND PHRASES

Adding ‘bapak’ or ‘pak’ (for men over 30 or married) and ‘ibu’ or ‘bu’ (for women over 30 or married) to your sentence is considered polite and helps you blend in. For those under 30, you can use ‘mas’ for men and ‘mbak’ for women.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

As a general rule, questions starting with ‘apa’ are yes/no questions, and questions ending in ‘apa’ are open-ended questions.

FOOD & DRINK

Dishes you might find on the menus of local eateries and food stalls are ‘nasi goreng’ (fried rice), ‘sate’ (grilled meat skewers with peanut sauce), ‘gado gado’ (mixed vegetables and egg in peanut sauce) and ‘bakso’ (the beloved but sometimes highly-questionable meatballs).

EMERGENCY

For emergencies, each department has its own emergency call number. Dial 110 for the police, 118 for the ambulance or 113 for the fire brigade.

NUMBERS

Numbers are great to have up your sleeve because you’ll use them often. Practice using lessons online like this one so you’re ready for buying, bargaining and paying.

Prices in Indonesian Rupiah (IDR or Rp) are generally expressed in the thousands so often Indonesians will drop the last three zeros when expressing numbers. For example, you might hear or see a Rp 6,000 bottle of water referred to as costing ‘enam’ (six) rather than ‘enam ribu’ (six thousand).

DIRECTIONS

HOW TO TALK TO YOUR DRIVER WHEN USING A RIDE HAILING APP LIKE GO-JEK, GRAB OR UBER

Ride-hailing apps have revolutionized life in Jakarta in just a few short years, giving everybody easier and more convenient ways of navigating the capital’s traffic chaos. But for visitors or new residents who want to make use of their services will need to navigate the language barrier of talking to your driver. To the non-initiated, this can be pretty baffling. But it doesn’t have to be: here’s the Coconuts guide to ordering a ride.

Generally, the driver is able to see your name, pick-up location and destination. Most of the time though, he (because the drivers are almost always men) will either call or message you using the in-app chat to confirm. Each comes with its challenges. The rapid-fire questions in informal Bahasa Indonesia over the phone can be incredibly overwhelming for beginner speakers, even without the background noise of peak hour traffic. A text message gives you more time to figure out what he’s saying, but you’ll need to decipher his abbreviations and text slang first. Here are some common questions to look out for and suggested responses.

The driver will often start with a greeting, such as ‘selamat pagi/siang/sore/malam, kak’. Kak is short for ‘kakak’ (older sibling), and translates to something like ‘sis’ or ‘bro’.

Then they will usually ask:

                    Q ‘Di mana’, ‘dimana’ or ‘dmn’, meaning ‘where are you?’

Other variations are:

                    Q ‘Posisi dmn’

                    Q ‘Sebelah mana’

                    Q ‘Lagi dmn’, meaning ‘where are you right now?’

You can answer:

                    A ‘(Saya) di …’ = ‘I am at ….’

                    A ‘Dekat di …’ = ‘I am close to …’

                    A ‘Di luar…’ = ‘I’m outside of …’

                    A ‘Di sebelah …’ = ‘I’m next to …’

Add ‘pak’ (or ‘mas’ if he looks younger than 30, or ‘ibu’/’mbak’ for women) to the end of your sentence to be polite.

Once they know where you are, they might ask a question using ‘pakai’, eg

                    Q ‘Pakai apa?’ meaning ‘what are you wearing?’.

They’re not being creepy here, they want to know who to look out for. Don’t worry about being specific, simply tell them:

                    A ‘(Saya) pakai….’ = ‘I am wearing ….’

COLORS

To find out your destination (yes, even though it’s right there on the phone screen) they will ask:

                    Q ‘Ke mana?’ = ‘Where to?’

Simply recite the name of your destination. Most drivers navigate by sight and not by maps, so landmarks work a lot better than addresses. A more formal answer is:

                    A ‘Saya mau pergi ke …’ = ‘I want to go to …’

They could ask:

                    Q ‘Alamatnya di mana?’ or something similar, meaning ‘What is the address?’

The easiest thing to do here is to pull up the address on your phone and show it to them, or again simply recite it.

If you hear the word ‘lagi’ (‘again’), repeat slowly in your best accent. Indonesians like to check things multiple times, so ‘ya’ is a common feature of all conversations.

It is a rule of communicating with any Go-Jek driver that you must say “Terima kasih ya” and then both say “Ya. Ya ya. Ya. Ya ya ya” several thousand times before hanging up

— Nadia Woodhouse (@nadiawoodhouse) January 25, 2018

If you really have no idea what is going on, you can tell them ‘maaf, saya tidak mengerti’ (‘sorry, I don’t understand’) and they will (probably) figure it out.