Hi, welcome!
Bahasa Malaysia is Malaysia's national language and is formerly known as Bahasa Melayu (Malay language). It is not only spoken in Malaysia but is also widely spoken in Indonesia*, Brunei and Singapore. Some people say that Bahasa Malaysia is an easy language. To a certain extent it is, but believe me, it is not so easy that you can afford to study it while listening to your favourite music at the same time!
The truth is there is no EASY language in the world. Everything is relative so when people say that Malay (which is the basis of Bahasa Malaysia) is an easy language what they really mean is that it IS easy when compared to studying a language like English, French or Mandarin, for example. Thus if you need to spend 300 hours studying English, French or Mandarin before you are able to use it in a simple conversation, you need only spend 100 hours studying Malay before you are able to do so. This is because in Malay there is no past tense or past participles of verbs to study as in English, the verbs are not conjugated as in French and you don't have to worry about getting the tones right as you have to in Mandarin.
But there is still a core vocabulary to be learnt - for colours, common adjectives, common verbs, names of objects around you, relationships, greetings, numbers, days of the week, telling the time, etc. etc. Not to mention about an aspect of Bahasa Malaysia that is particularly difficult for foreigners to master, namely the use of prefixes in verbs.
So it is still 100 hours of solid study and hard work! And by 100 hours I don't mean 4 days and 4 hours of non-stop studying. It's more likely to be an hour's concentrated study every day over a period of three and a half months.
So don't expect me to lead you up the garden path by telling you how easy the Malay language is. I have spent much time and hard work building up this course. Are you ready to devote at least a hundred hours and do some hard work on your side? If so, let's go! With such determination I'm sure you're going to succeed. And good luck. Click to enter.
