The root word is hiding inside the long one

Indonesian has a reputation as an easy language, and for a traveller it largely deserves it: no tenses, no plurals you must mark, no polite verb forms. The difficulty arrives later, once you try to understand what people say to each other rather than what they say to you.

Words are built from roots with prefixes and suffixes. Beli is buy; membeli is the verb in its formal dress; dibeli is bought; pembeli is a buyer. The prefix me- also swallows the first letter of some roots, so tulis, write, becomes menulis, and sewa, rent, becomes menyewa. To look a word up you have to strip it back to its root first. Signs use these constantly: dilarang merokok is no smoking, dijual is for sale, and disewakan, with -kan on the end, is for rent.

The Indonesian you hear is not the Indonesian you read. Newspapers, announcements and this kit use standard Indonesian. On the streets of Jakarta, and on every Indonesian's phone, the language is looser: tidak becomes nggak or gak, sudah becomes udah, saja becomes aja, and very is banget, placed after the word. Among friends "I" and "you" are gue and lo, from the old Jakarta dialect — fine to recognise, odd for a visitor to use.

Prices come in ribu, and the ribu often goes unsaid. Almost every everyday price runs into thousands of rupiah, so a price is dua puluh ribu, twenty thousand, or simply dua puluh when context makes it obvious. Written, the thousands are marked with dots, not commas — Rp 20.000 — and price cards often shorten it to 20rb or 20K. A million is juta, the word you will hear for a hotel bill or a dive course. Jakarta also has street slang from Hokkien: goceng is 5,000, ceban 10,000.

Doubling a word does more than make a plural. Hati-hati, careful, is what someone says as you leave. Pelan-pelan is slowly, oleh-oleh the gifts a traveller brings home, and mata-mata, doubled eye, is a spy. In text messages the double is often written with a 2: hati2.

A language that says what it spells

Indonesian is one of the kindest languages in Asia to an English mouth. It has no tones, no genders, no verb endings to learn and almost no sounds you have never made. Spelling and speech line up because they were made to: reforms in 1947 and 1972, the second made jointly with Malaysia, swept away the Dutch-era spellings, so tj became c, dj became j and oe became u. That is why the port on Java's south coast once spelt Tjilatjap is now Cilacap, and why Jakarta's airport, Soekarno–Hatta, is said exactly as if it were spelt Sukarno. Learn the handful of rules on this page and you can read any menu, bus board or street sign aloud correctly on your first afternoon.

The few traps are all small. A c is always ch, so cumi-cumi, squid, begins like chew. The r is tapped or rolled and never swallowed. The e has two values, and the unstressed mumble is the safer guess. Beyond that, the real work is rhythm: Indonesian is spoken evenly, without the hammer blows English puts on stressed syllables, and a sentence said softly and level is far easier to follow than one said slowly and loudly. Start with greetings, which change with the time of day, and say them to everyone. Nothing opens a conversation faster.

Six things that catch visitors out

"Where are you going?" is a greeting, not a question. Mau ke mana? is called out from doorways and warung benches all day, the way an English speaker says "all right?". Nobody needs your itinerary. A vague, friendly answer — ke sana, over there, or ke pasar, to the market — is the correct reply, and asking it back is better still. Sudah makan?, have you eaten yet?, works the same way: it means hello, and sudah, already, is the answer.

The tub in the bathroom is not for getting into. Many homes, guesthouses and local places have a mandi: a tank of clean water and a plastic dipper, the gayung. You stand beside it and pour water over yourself; the tank is shared and must stay clean. Toilets often come with a hose or a dipper instead of paper, so keep tissues in your bag, and expect squat toilets outside the cities and the bigger hotels.

Eat with your right hand when everyone else does. In a nasi Padang restaurant or a village kitchen, rice is eaten with the fingers of the right hand, and the bowl of water with a slice of lime set beside your plate is a kobokan, for rinsing your fingers. It is not soup, and it is not for drinking. A spoon and fork are always available for the asking: sendok garpu.

Ramadan changes the daytime. During the fasting month most of the country does not eat or drink from dawn to sunset. Visitors are not expected to fast, but eating, drinking and smoking openly in the street is unkind, and in conservative regions many restaurants curtain their windows or open only at dusk. The evening meal that breaks the fast, buka puasa, is the best street food of the year: stalls selling sweet drinks and snacks for the moment of sunset, takjil, appear on every corner in the late afternoon. Expect the neighbourhood to be woken before dawn, too, by drums or loudspeakers calling people to the pre-dawn meal, sahur.

Lebaran moves the whole country. At the end of Ramadan, Idul Fitri — Lebaran — sends tens of millions of people home to their villages in the exodus called mudik. For a week or more transport sells out, roads jam and many businesses in the cities close. Book well ahead or stay put. The reward for staying is a Jakarta briefly half-empty and, in many neighbourhoods, open houses where visitors are welcomed with cakes.

Affection stays private. Holding hands is widely seen, but kissing and embracing in public is frowned on almost everywhere outside the beach resorts, and in Aceh it can bring real trouble. Friends of the same sex walking arm in arm, on the other hand, is ordinary and means only friendship. Modest dress matters most at the very places where affection does: a mosque, a village, a family home.

Everyone's second language

Indonesian is the language of a nation, but for a great many Indonesians it is not the language of home. It was chosen as the language of unity by a youth congress in 1928, from the Malay that had been the trading language of the archipelago for centuries, precisely because it belonged to no one ethnic group. Today it is learned at school and used in government, business, television and between strangers, while families speak Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese or one of hundreds of other languages at the kitchen table. That works in your favour: you are speaking everyone's shared second language, and people are used to adjusting it for listeners.

English depends on where you are. In south Bali, on the Gili islands and in the dive resorts it is almost universal among anyone working with visitors. In Jakarta it is common among the young and the office-working. On a long-distance bus, in a Javanese market town, at a warung in Flores or with a becak driver in Yogyakarta, it may be absent altogether, and the Indonesian in this kit is what gets you fed and moved.

The reaction to even a little Indonesian is out of all proportion to the effort. Visitors who say terima kasih and permisi are common; those who can ask the price, follow the answer and make a small joke are rare, and the response — laughter, a pulled-up chair, often a photo — is the best reason to learn it.

Bapak, Ibu, and the yes that means maybe

In speech, the title replaces the word for you. Anda is the formal "you" of signs, forms and advertising, but face to face it can sound stiff. Indonesians instead address an older or senior man as Bapak, short Pak, and a woman as Ibu, short Bu, and use the title right where English uses "you": Bapak mau ke mana?, where are you going, sir? Teachers, officials, drivers and shopkeepers all get Pak or Bu, and a visitor who uses them sounds well brought up.

Kamu is for equals and intimates. Said to a friend, a child or someone clearly younger, kamu is warm. Said to an older stranger it sounds presumptuous. For yourself, saya is always correct; aku is the casual "I" you will hear among friends and in pop songs. Mas and Mbak, older brother and older sister in Javanese, are now heard across the country for waiters, drivers and anyone young enough not to be a Pak or Bu.

Halus is the quality everyone is aiming for. The word means smooth, refined, soft, and it describes the ideal manner: a quiet voice, an unhurried pace, no visible irritation. Its opposite, kasar, coarse, is what loud complaint and visible impatience look like from the other side. Request with tolong; offer with silakan; and when thanked, answer sama-sama or the slightly more formal kembali.

Refuse by removing the need, not by saying no. The everyday polite refusal is tidak usah, or in speech nggak usah, "no need", with a smile and terima kasih. Lain kali, another time, closes a sales pitch kindly. The same softness comes back at you: mungkin, maybe, and nanti, later, often mean the thing will not happen, and a yes can mean only that someone does not want to disappoint you. Ask open questions — "what time does it leave?" rather than "does it leave at nine?" — and you will get more reliable answers.

Seventeen thousand islands, hundreds of languages

Indonesia stretches across some seventeen thousand islands, and around seven hundred languages are spoken on them. Indonesian holds it together, but every region has a home language, its own forms of address and its own food. A visitor who moves between islands hears it at once: the Mas of Java becomes Bli for a man in Bali, Bang in Jakarta and much of Sumatra, Uda among the Minangkabau and Akang in Sundanese-speaking West Java.

Javanese, the largest of the regional languages, is famous for its speech levels: ngoko between equals and to those below, krama upwards to elders and superiors, with whole sets of different words for the same things. Visitors are not expected to manage it, but two words of high Javanese are a gift in Yogyakarta or Solo: matur nuwun, thank you, and monggo, please go ahead, said with an open hand.

Bali is a Hindu island in a mostly Muslim country, with its own language, its own calendar and temple festivals almost every week somewhere. Balinese also has speech levels, and Balinese first names often record birth order: Wayan, Made, Nyoman and Ketut, first to fourth child, so you will meet a great many of each. On Nyepi, the day of silence at the Balinese new year, the whole island shuts down, the airport included, and visitors stay inside their hotels.

Sumatra is the homeland of the Minangkabau, a matrilineal society whose cooking travels the country as nasi Padang: rendang and a dozen other dishes are set out on the table and you pay only for what you eat. Around Lake Toba the Batak greet each other with Horas! In Aceh, at the northern tip, Islamic law shapes public life and dress is conservative. And Jakarta has its own original people, the Betawi, whose dialect gave the capital its slang and whose kerak telor, a spiced egg and rice pancake, is cooked over charcoal on the street.

Indonesia, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Rijsttafel, the rice table, is a Dutch invention rather than an Indonesian one: colonial households wanted dozens of Javanese and Sumatran dishes brought out at once to show off the range.
• Soto is not one soup but a whole family of them: coconut-thick soto Betawi in Jakarta, turmeric-yellow soto Lamongan in East Java, beefy coto in Makassar, each defended by its own town.
• Komodo dragons live wild only in eastern Indonesia, on Komodo, Rinca, Gili Motang and Nusa Kode and along the coasts of much larger Flores, and nowhere else on earth.
• Street-food carts in Indonesia are called kaki lima, five legs, usually explained as the cart's three wheels plus the two feet of whoever is pushing it.
• Borobudur on Java was assembled in the ninth century from interlocking blocks with no mortar, and its galleries carry more than two thousand relief panels meant to be read while walking.
• Alfred Russel Wallace worked out natural selection while collecting in the Maluku islands in 1858 and posted the essay to Darwin, which is what finally pushed Darwin into print.
• Terima kasih, the ordinary thank you, breaks into terima, to receive, and kasih, affection, so you are telling someone you accept the kindness they offered.
• Indonesian makes a plural by saying the word twice: anak is a child and anak-anak is children, so a shop sign for books simply reads buku-buku.
• Tempeh was invented on Java, where cooked soybeans are bound by a white mould into a firm, nutty cake that slices like bread and fries like a steak.
• In Indonesian, goodbye splits in two: the person leaving says selamat tinggal, stay safely, and the person staying says selamat jalan, go safely.
• Masuk angin translates as wind got in, the Indonesian catch-all for feeling off-colour, and the household remedy is kerokan, scraping the back with a coin until it stripes red.
• In 1667 the Dutch and the English swapped islands: the Dutch kept Run, a speck in Maluku where nutmeg grew, and the English kept Manhattan.
• A 1972 spelling reform replaced Dutch letter clusters with simpler ones, turning tj into c and dj into j, which is why Djakarta is now written Jakarta.
• Jamu is a bitter-sweet herbal tonic of turmeric, tamarind and ginger, traditionally carried house to house by women with the bottles bundled in a cloth on their back.
• Lake Toba fills an enormous volcanic caldera in Sumatra and holds an island in the middle of it, Samosir, which is roughly the size of Singapore.
• The Wallace Line runs down the narrow strait between Bali and Lombok: on one side the animals are Asian, on the other Australasian, and the gap is close enough to see across.
• Cloves grew naturally on only a few small islands in Maluku, which is why a spice from a tree on Ternate reached medieval European kitchens at extraordinary prices.
• Kopi tubruk is coffee made by pouring boiling water straight onto the grounds in the glass, with no filter at all, so you stop drinking when you reach the silt.
• Kawah Ijen on Java burns blue after dark, as sulphurous gas escaping the crater catches fire and runs down the rock in electric-blue rivers.
• The Toraja of Sulawesi build tongkonan houses whose roofs sweep up at both ends like the prow of a boat, with rows of buffalo horns mounted down the front post.
• Surabaya's name is read as sura and baya, shark and crocodile, and the city's emblem shows the pair of them wrestling.
• Gotong royong, carrying the load together, is the Indonesian expectation that neighbours turn out for a wedding, a house move or a new roof, and that you will turn out for theirs.
• Sunday mornings in Jakarta belong to pedestrians: the main avenues close to cars and fill with joggers, cyclists, aerobics classes and food stalls.
• No country has more active volcanoes than Indonesia, and the ash they lay down is why Java's rice fields can be harvested more than once a year.
• Spread across more than 17,000 islands, Indonesia runs to three time zones, so the eastern islands sit down to dinner two hours before Jakarta does.
• A small human species barely a metre tall, Homo floresiensis, was dug out of Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2003 and nicknamed the hobbit almost immediately.
• Rafflesia arnoldii, which has no stem, leaves or roots of its own, opens the largest single flower on earth on the rainforest floor of Sumatra and smells of rotting meat to bring in flies.
• Gado-gado, a plate of blanched vegetables under warm peanut sauce, takes its name from a word for mixing, roughly mix-mix, which is exactly what you do to it before eating.
• On Madura they race bulls: in karapan sapi a pair is harnessed to a wooden sled and sent down a straight dirt track, with the jockey standing on the sled and holding on.
• Java holds more people than any other island on earth, though four of the country's other islands, New Guinea, Borneo, Sumatra and Sulawesi, are all larger.
• Birds of paradise display in the forests of Indonesian Papua, where a male clears a patch of ground or a branch and keeps it swept bare so nothing distracts from his dance.
• Batik is drawn with a canting, a small copper spout that trails hot wax across the cloth; the wax blocks the dye, and a final boiling melts it away to reveal the pattern.
• More than 700 living languages are spoken across the islands, and Indonesian is a second language for most of the people who use it, adopted in 1928 to give the archipelago a common tongue.
• Tumpeng is a cone of turmeric-yellow rice built for birthdays and blessings, and the ceremony is simply this, the tip is sliced off and given to the guest of honour.
• Badminton is Indonesia's national sport, and the first Olympic gold medals the country ever won were both taken on a badminton court in 1992.
• Pinisi schooners are still built by eye on the beaches of South Sulawesi, without drawings, from proportions the shipwrights carry in their heads and pass down.
• The maleo, a bird found only on Sulawesi, buries its outsized egg in sand warmed by volcanic heat and walks away; the chick digs itself out and can fly the day it hatches.
• The sun in Indonesian is matahari, which is mata plus hari, the eye of the day.
• In a Padang restaurant nobody hands you a menu: a dozen small plates are stacked in front of you at once, and you pay only for the ones you touch.
• At the end of the fasting month cities across Indonesia empty out, as people travel back to their home villages in a great homecoming called mudik.
• Javanese has parallel vocabularies for politeness: to eat is mangan among friends and dhahar when speaking to an elder, so the word you pick announces the relationship.
• Madagascar was settled by seafarers from Borneo: Malagasy is an Austronesian language, and its closest living relatives are still spoken in southern Kalimantan.
• Each player in an angklung group holds a bamboo rattle tuned to one note and one note only, so a tune exists only while the whole ensemble is in the room.
• Salak is called snake fruit for the glossy brown scales on its skin; peel it and the segments inside are crisp and dry, tasting somewhere between pineapple and apple.
• Java became English slang for coffee because the island supplied so much of what Europe was drinking, and the name stuck long after the trade moved on.
• On Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence, the entire island stops, with no traffic, no work and no lights after dark, and the international airport closes for a full twenty-four hours.
• Pencak silat, Indonesia's own martial art, is performed at weddings and village festivals as often as in competition, usually to drums and a reed pipe.
• Rendang is simmered so long in coconut milk and spice that the liquid disappears entirely and the beef fries in what is left; the Minangkabau of West Sumatra made it that way so it would keep for days without a fridge.
• Raja Ampat, off the western tip of Papua, sits in the heart of the Coral Triangle and holds a greater variety of reef fish and coral than anywhere else that has been counted.
• Bali's rice terraces are fed by subak, a cooperative network of canals and water temples that farmers have run among themselves since around the ninth century.
• English took orangutan whole from orang hutan, person of the forest, the local name for the red apes of Sumatra and Borneo.
• Prambanan, built on Java in the ninth century, is a Hindu complex whose central tower stands 47 metres high and whose walls tell the Ramayana in carved stone.
• Balinese first names follow birth order rather than gender: Wayan, Made, Nyoman and Ketut for the first four children, and a fifth child starts the cycle again.
• Sambal matah from Bali is never cooked: raw shallot, lemongrass, chilli and lime leaf are sliced fine and woken up with hot coconut oil poured over the top.
• The country's name is built from Greek: Indos for India and nesos for island, coined by nineteenth-century scholars for the chain of islands southeast of India.
• Debussy heard a Javanese gamelan, a bronze percussion orchestra, at the Paris exhibition of 1889 and never got over it; its layered, shimmering textures echo through his piano music.
• Homo erectus was first identified from a skullcap unearthed beside the Solo River on Java in 1891, and the find went by the name Java Man for decades.
• Wayang kulit shadow plays can run from dusk until dawn, with one puppeteer voicing every character, cueing the orchestra and working the puppets at the same time.
• Jam karet, an Indonesian phrase, means rubber time, the shared understanding that an agreed hour can stretch and that nobody is being rude when it does.
• Indonesian verbs never change shape for tense; you set a small word beside them instead, sudah for already done and belum for not yet, and the sentence sorts itself out.