Singapore Expats

Hi ,

Anyone care to share their experience for learning conversational Malay. I have tried a couple of CC's but not effective.

Look forward to some recommendations ...cheers

Ajit

kingajit wrote:Hi ,

Anyone care to share their experience for learning conversational Malay. I have tried a couple of CC's but not effective.

Look forward to some recommendations ...cheers

Ajit

Malay is actually one of the easiest languages to learn. I assume you meant community centres when you said CC, so what went wrong when you tried to learn from CC? I'm curious.

I speak fluent Malay but I can't commit to language exchange arrangement but I can give few pointers on learning if you need to know.

For starters, converse with a Malay more. Perhaps it could be a helpful colleague, a friendly "pakcik" (uncle) or "makcik" (aunty) who sells in that Malay stall in your favourite coffee shops, or someone you always meet in your neighbourhood. You will be surprised how warm, friendly and engaging they are when they know you're keen to learn their language. Best way to learn basic sentence structure that way. Stuff like subject + predicate, noun + adjective, user + verb + object.

You probably know some words already in your interaction with fellow Singaporeans here. There is no way you could miss these words if you interact with Singaporeans a lot: tahan, makan, sekali, boleh/tak boleh.

And of course a lot of names of places in Singapore are originally Malay like Bukit Batok (hill, cough), Tanjung Pagar (cape, fence), Tiong Bahru (mynah, new), Bukit Timah (hill, tin), Jalan Membina (road, to build), Lorong Kilat (alley, lightning), etc. Of course not all of them mean literally but they have interesting history behind the names. Good to start.

Very fascinating when you start realising the wonderful details.

Ask again if you have specifics. I personally do not know any good teachers but I guess going to places like Inlingua helps.

I learnt Malay (actually Bahasa Indonesia but same2) at Uni. I then had the privileged of going on an exchange program to Indo for a few months. I'm not sure I could have learnt it in Singapore otherwise as it simply is not spoken enough (apart from in the family).

A real effective way to learn colloquial Malay is to record the Suria soaps and then play them subtitle by subtitle. It's boring, but awesome at "getting" the lingo as it's spoken now, idiom, slang etc, as opposed to just learning words.

By the way, each time I'm left to my own devices in Malaysia, I learn more than any other way.

Do many SG person talk Malay there? What is SG national language?

KleenWayne70 wrote:Do many SG person talk Malay there? What is SG national language?

English

Correction. English is the language of government. There are four national languages though, English, Mandarin, Malay & Tamil. Among the older folks here (say 50 & up), most can speak at least market Malay, which is an easy bridging point. That said, the pidgin English spoken by the sub-50 group is sadly taking over. This is a form of very bad English (grammar-wise) full of words/phrases in Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay and some Tamil. It's virtually incomprehensible/unintelligible to native English speakers.

Mostly spoken by the Malay community but the older Singaporeans from other ethnicity also speaks Malay, especially Peranakans because their Mother Tongue subject in Singapore schools would be assigned as Malay instead of Mandarin.

To correct MayDay5, Singapore has four national languages - English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil.