There’s a good chance I’m not qualified to proclaim this opinion out loud, but this is the internet so…
I don’t think Indonesian belongs in the yellow category. Indonesian has no tenses, no cases, nothing. Sure, there’s little-to-no overlap in the vocab, but the structure of the language was so straightforward, that a month or 2 with the phrasebook was basically all that was required to survive in country. I wasn’t having a lot of deep conversations in Indonesian, but one time I excused myself while squeezing past somebody on a plane, mistakenly giving him the impression that I was local, and ended up getting invited to his sister’s house for dinner during Eid.
For context, I took 2 years of French in High School (where I took it more seriously than you’d think), and I took 3 courses of Russian in undergrad.
There’s a good chance I’m not qualified to proclaim this opinion out loud, but this is the internet so…
I don’t think Indonesian belongs in the yellow category. Indonesian has no tenses, no cases, nothing. Sure, there’s little-to-no overlap in the vocab, but the structure of the language was so straightforward, that a month or 2 with the phrasebook was basically all that was required to survive in country. I wasn’t having a lot of deep conversations in Indonesian, but one time I excused myself while squeezing past somebody on a plane, mistakenly giving him the impression that I was local, and ended up getting invited to his sister’s house for dinner during Eid.
For context, I took 2 years of French in High School (where I took it more seriously than you’d think), and I took 3 courses of Russian in undergrad.