Learning Three Languages

I´m sorry I have been sleeping for a while.

Easterner,
Thank you for your corrections! I have studied Hungarian a little on my own, but words get mixed up in the mind when time passes (especially when one hasn´t never really learnt the language properly). I remember the saying 'Tiszan innen' - in this context 'innen' means 'on the other side of', doesn´t it? I found this saying nice as the -n in 'Tiszan' is like the genitive ending in Finnish.
'here from Finland' would be in Finnish 'täältä Suomesta'; 'from this house' would be 'tästä talosta' ('tästä' is the elative case of the word 'tämä' (this), 'täältä' is the adverb 'from here').
Consonant gradation in Finnish (and Estonian) is difficult. We say 'koti' but 'kodissa' and 'kodista'. Estonian has a still broader gradation system than Finnish but in this very case the middle consonant is not graded: kodu - kodus - kodust.
Thank your for your illustrative explanations of vowel shortenings in your szép mother tongue!
By the way, what is the situation of Hungarian like in Vojvodina now? Do the Hungarian children there attend schools where instruction is given in their mother tongue?

Kabayan,
thank you for your examples on levels in Sundanese! They really seem to make word learning a hard task! Of course, I should begin to learn the exotic and fascinating languages of your archipelago in order to get a better understanding of them. I know only some single words of Bahasa. Is 'ya' = yes (and is the first sound same in Bahasa and English)? Is 'jalan-jalan' = by foot (and is 'j' pronounced as in English?) 'Orang-utan' (or something like this) means 'the man of the forest', doesn´t it?

You're welcome Suomalainen. You must be very busy lately.
Word learning might be a hard task in sundanese and javanese, but they have no tenses. :)
You know some words in Bahasa, that's good. Pronunciation and spelling in bahasa is more consistant than English.
The only time I was being exposured by Swedish or finnish was when I played with my Handphone. Can you tell me the websites where I can hear finnish or swedish in speaking ?

Kabayan,
I want to ask about the role of English in Indonesia. Do most people speak it? How often do they use it in daily life?

English has replaced Dutch as a source of Technological Jargons.
in recent years, Many technological jargons has been absorbed into Bahasa mainly via English. However, sometimes Indonesian grammarians find that some words from local languages can be used as a synonim to English words.

The ability of average Indonesians to speak English is less than Our neighboring countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Phillipines, Brunei, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Hi! I live in australia where it is generaly not expected that you know more than one language! I hate it! My mothjer tongue is English. In australia we have our own slang but we still speak english!! I saw an american show with subtitles for an aboriginal speaking English when I understood it perfectly!

I currently am learning 3 languages at once. I spent a few days planning before I started and I have also read the book "How to learn languages, the fast easy way" By Bill Handley who currently speak 15 languages at varying degrees of comprehension.
The languages i am learning are chinese. japanese and french...
It is easy when you know how... i memorise list of 35 words a day and review the next day and every day before my new word list in a language.
for grammar i read and learn passvily and it sinks in. then i go back and really study it hard
Please, tell me of your expriences!!! And what is english like as a second langauge? hard to learn?

The linguistic diversity in Indonesia reminds me a little of the situation in ex-Yugoslavia. There, Serbo-Croatian (a term used for the common standard language with only dialectal differences spoken by Serbs and Croats - now in disuse*) was something of a lingua franca (being the language with the largest number of speakers), although Slovenians in particular largely were rather reluctant to use it, except when really needed. Two other related languages were Slovenian and Macedonian (both spoken by a group of people numbering between 1-2 million, in the extreme north and south, respectively), and a Macedonian person could effectively communicate with one from Slovenia via Serbo-Croatian only. The two largest non-Slavic linguistic groups were Albanians (about 2 million) and Hungarians (about 0.4-0.5 million), and the two could also communicate with each other via Serbo-Croatian.

If you happened to live as a member of a non-Slavic group in Slovenia or Macedonia, or vice versa (which did happen sometimes, although not very often), you were bound to end up as a trilingual, because you usually mastered the local language to communicate with the locals, and Serbo-Croatian with the rest. However, even if you were not living in such a surrounding, you could still understand a lot of Slovenian and Macedonian, because they were rather close to Serbo-Croatian. I remember that we used to have many Albanian bakers in Subotica (a town with a large number of Hungarians), and some of them picked up some Hungarian, too (which they preferred over Serbian).

I guess ex-Yugoslavia was a unique country in Europe due to the relatively high proportion of people (about 30 per cent or so of the 22 million inhabitants, on an area of 256.000 squaree kilometres, if I remember correctly) who had to use the most widely spoken language out of necessity, while not being native in it (this making it more similar to such countries as the ex-Soviet Union, India, China, Indonesia and some other Asian and African countries). The only other European country with the similar proportion which I can think of is Spain (with the proportion of Catalonians, Basques and Galitians taken together within the whole population being nearly the same, or a little less).

*Of course it is the term that has been in disuse since the collapse of ex-Yugoslavia, not the language. The latter has now three names - Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian - depending on which country we are speaking about. The use of these three names is somewhat misleading, since Serbs, Croats and Bosnians (more precisely, the Muslims in Bosnia) can understand each other without any difficulty. I guess the situation is similar with regard to Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia - I once read a version of a text in both in a user manual, and they seemed almost identical to me.