This is a pleasant little Indonesian textbook that aims to teach reading skills as rapidly as possible; Indonesian dialogues and passages of gradually increasing complexity are accompanied by vocabularies and grammar outlines, with a global vocabulary added at the back. There are a few minor problems with the text — mistakes in the author's English (note the missing indefinite article in the title) and the occasional formatting error — but these do not really affect its value as a textbook. A bigger problem might be getting hold of a copy; mine was bought in Malang, and I don't know whether the book is available outside Indonesia. At any rate, I really liked the approach, and if there are other textbooks that do it better than this one I haven't seen them.

January 1994

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- books about the Indonesian language