How long does it take to learn Indonesian?

The milestones on the way to Indonesian fluency

Indonesian is FSI Category II, and the 828-hour figure is the estimate to professional working proficiency, not the point where the language becomes usable. The waypoints come much earlier:

FSI publishes a total to General Professional Proficiency and no figure for any earlier level, so the A2 and B1 waypoints here are our own rounded shares of that total. They are shown so this page can answer when conversation becomes possible without inventing an FSI figure that does not exist.

FSI measures its endpoint as Speaking 3 and Reading 3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, which published crosswalks place somewhere around CEFR B2 to C1. Those crosswalks disagree with each other and no official conversion exists, so treat the CEFR labels here as an approximate guide rather than an equivalence.

Studying more or less than an hour a day? Model your own pace with the fluency calculator.

How many hours does it take to become fluent in Indonesian?

The US Foreign Service Institute puts Indonesian at 828 class hours to professional working proficiency, the level at which you can work in the language. It publishes that as 36 weeks of full-time training, on a typical week of 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study. Fluency has no single official definition, which is why the hour count is the honest way to answer this.

How long does it take the average person to learn Indonesian?

There is no measured figure for the average person, and anyone quoting one is guessing. The 828-hour benchmark describes full-time students in small classes with several hours of individual study a day, which is not how most people learn. The hour total is still the useful anchor: at an hour a day it works out to about 28 months, and at half an hour a day about 55 months.

How long does it take to learn Indonesian on your own?

The Foreign Service Institute does not publish a self-study equivalent, so the "double it if you are on your own" numbers you see are unsourced. What is on the record is that the 828 hours were measured under intensive instruction with a teacher. Treat them as a benchmark set under ideal conditions rather than a forecast for solo study, and track your progress in hours logged instead of months elapsed.

How long does it take to learn Indonesian from English?

The 828-hour estimate is specifically for native English speakers. The FSI sorts languages by how far they sit from English and places Indonesian in Category II, one step further from English than Spanish or Italian. If you already speak a language closely related to Indonesian, you would expect to move faster than the benchmark, though the FSI publishes no figure for that case.

How fast can you learn Indonesian?

The realistic answer is a pace rather than a date. 828 hours is about 55 months at half an hour a day, about 28 months at an hour a day, and about 39 weeks at three hours a day. That is the same amount of learning on three different calendars, so the variable you actually control is how many hours a week you can keep logging.

Can you learn Indonesian faster by watching Netflix?

Watching does not shrink the 828 hours, but it changes whether you keep logging them. Graded, comprehensible viewing builds listening and vocabulary in context, and saving the words you meet for spaced review turns watch time into study time. There is a catch worth knowing before betting the plan on television. Across the 106 title and language entries in our open Netflix difficulty index, none is rated A1 and only 2 sit at A2, while 82 percent sit at B1 or B2. Ordinary adult television starts at intermediate, so the early hours still need graded or beginner material and the catalogue opens up later. Two honest limits on that: it describes our catalogue rather than Netflix, since we chose these titles as plausibly useful for learners and the selection shapes the distribution as much as the material does, and the bands are editorial estimates of listening difficulty rather than learner test results. That is what LingoBinge does with Indonesian on Netflix: it swaps a few subtitle words to your level while you watch.

How long until you can hold a conversation in Indonesian?

Basic conversation (CEFR A2) arrives far before the full total: around 248 study hours for Indonesian, which is roughly 8 months at an hour a day. FSI hours are intensive classroom hours for motivated adult learners, so they are a benchmark, not a promise.

What learning Indonesian actually involves

The hardest part of Indonesian for English speakers

The obstacle is diglossia. Sneddon shows Indonesian closely fits Ferguson's model: a codified High variety learned through formal education and absent from ordinary conversation, and a Low variety carrying everyday speech. The cost is that a grammar built from H materials holds no entries for L forms, so each utterance needs a mapping step H rules do not derive, as when H membohongi surfaces as L bohongin. In his conversation recordings the L negator nggak took 1,606 of 1,640 negation tokens, 97.9 per cent, against 2.1 per cent for tidak, the only negator the standard reference grammar lists for non nominals.

Source: Sneddon, J. N. 2003. 'Diglossia in Indonesian'. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159(4), 519-549. Leiden: KITLV.

What is easier in Indonesian than people expect

Number is never obligatory on the Indonesian noun. WALS records nominal plurality as available on all nouns but always optional, so a bare noun covers one item or many. Stress is predictable rather than lexical, falling on the penultimate syllable of unaffixed words and usually moving to the final syllable when the penultimate vowel is a schwa. So no plural ending has to be chosen and no accent has to be memorised word by word.

Sources: Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. 'Occurrence of Nominal Plurality', WALS chapter 34A. Datapoint Indonesian, value: All nouns, always optional. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.; Soderberg, Craig D. & Kenneth S. Olson. 2008. 'Indonesian' (Illustrations of the IPA). Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38(2), 209-213.

Why the FSI puts Indonesian where it does

Indonesian sits in Category II of the Foreign Service Institute scale, 828 class hours over about 36 weeks. German carries the identical total, even though WALS records German with four cases and three genders while Indonesian has neither. No descriptive label is printed on Category II, unlike the labels on the bands above and below it, and the Institute publishes no per-language rationale, so the bands report the time it expects a learner to need for an Interagency Language Roundtable score of 3 rather than any tally of grammatical features.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, School of Language Studies. 'Foreign Language Training'. Category II Languages: Approximately 36 weeks (828 class hours), listing German, Haitian Creole, Indonesian, Malay and Swahili.; Iggesen, Oliver A. 2013. 'Number of Cases', WALS chapter 49A. Datapoint German, value: 4 cases. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.; Corbett, Greville G. 2013. 'Number of Genders', WALS chapter 30A. Datapoint German, value: Three. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.; Iggesen, Oliver A. 2013. 'Number of Cases', WALS chapter 49A. Datapoint Indonesian, value: No morphological case-marking. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.; Corbett, Greville G. 2013. 'Number of Genders', WALS chapter 30A. Datapoint Indonesian, value: None. In Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Checked and not published

Claims about Indonesian that circulate widely but that we could not trace to a primary source, so this page does not make them.

• The current official spelling standard is EYD Edisi V (2022), which supersedes the 2016 Pedoman Umum Ejaan Bahasa Indonesia I cited. Badan Bahasa's own host is not on the URL allowlist and I found no allowlisted copy of the 2022 edition, so the 26/5/21 letter counts and the four digraphs are attributed to the 2016 edition I actually read. I did not assert that these counts are unchanged in EYD V.
• I state no speaker-population figure. The JIPA Illustration gives roughly 23 million first-language and 140 million second-language speakers, but sources those to Grimes 1996 and Gordon 2005, i.e. Ethnologue editions now two decades old.
• I state no total phoneme count and no vowel-inventory count anywhere, because the Cambridge page summary and the article PDF disagreed (see authorNotes) and a count is not needed for any claim I make.
• I did not claim that the colloquial Low variety is acquired as a first language, nor give any figure for how many acquire Indonesian natively. Sneddon discusses the question but I did not find a number I would stand behind.
• Verifier note: grammarLoad originally read that verbs take no person or number agreement with the subject. No source cited here states that, and the one typology database cited codes Indonesian at WALS chapter 102A as Only the P argument, which is a statement about the patient argument rather than a blanket absence of person marking. The sentence now reports the WALS 102A datapoint as WALS states it, and the broader no-agreement claim is left unasserted.
• Verifier note: pleasantSurprise originally closed by saying that neither Russian mobile stress nor the Romance conjugation table has a counterpart. Predictable penultimate stress is sourced to the JIPA Illustration, but nothing cited covers Russian accent placement or the absence of a conjugation paradigm in Indonesian, so that sentence was replaced by a consequence both cited sources do carry.