Indonesian Will Reward You Within a Week, and Greek Will Make You Suffer for a Decade and Still Laugh at Your Accent

🇮🇩 Indonesia 🇬🇷 Greece By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Some languages are designed, seemingly out of pity, to let a foreigner feel competent almost immediately. Others exist, seemingly out of spite, to remind you daily that fluency is a myth invented to torment adults. Indonesian is the former — no tenses, no genders, forgiving pronunciation, and a phrasebook's worth of basics that will genuinely get you through daily life within a fortnight. Greek is the latter — a different alphabet, brutal grammar, and a village dialect that bears only a passing resemblance to whatever you learned in your overpriced app.

I felt fluent-adjacent in Bahasa Indonesia within a month of arriving in Jakarta, which I now recognise was a dangerous, false confidence the language itself handed me on a plate. I have lived in Greece for years and still get gently corrected by an eighty-year-old kiosk owner who finds my accent, by his own admission, "very entertaining."

Do's & Don'ts: Indonesia

Do's & Don'ts: Greece

Indonesia: A Language That Actively Wants You to Succeed

Bahasa Indonesia is, structurally, one of the kindest languages a foreigner can attempt — no verb conjugations, no grammatical gender, no tenses in the way European languages demand, and a writing system using the same Latin alphabet you already know. Plurals are formed by simply repeating the word (buku becomes buku-buku for "books"), which felt, the first time I understood it, like being let in on a secret so simple it seemed unfair to every other language I'd struggled through. Within two or three weeks of consistent effort, a genuinely motivated newcomer can hold basic transactional conversations — market haggling, taxi directions, small talk with a warung owner — that would take years to reach in most other languages.

The reward system here is instant and social: Indonesians, in my experience across Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Bali, respond to any sincere attempt at Bahasa with visible, immediate delight, regardless of how mangled the grammar is. This isn't polite tolerance, it's genuine enthusiasm, and it creates a feedback loop that makes learning addictive rather than exhausting — every fumbled sentence gets met with encouragement instead of correction, which, frankly, is the opposite of what most of Europe does to you.

What nobody explains before you arrive is that "Indonesian" is something of a convenient fiction outside the standardised version taught in classes — the country has over 700 living languages, and in regions like Java, Bali, or Sumatra, Bahasa Indonesia is frequently a shared second language used for commerce and government while Javanese, Balinese, or Batak remains the language of home and heart. You can become genuinely functional in Indonesian remarkably fast. Becoming an insider in any specific region requires a second, much longer language journey most expats never start, and honestly, most don't need to.

Greece: A Language Engineered to Humble You Slowly, Forever

Greek offers none of Indonesian's mercy. You start with an entirely different alphabet, meaning even reading a street sign is its own small exam before you've said a single word aloud. Grammar involves cases — nominative, genitive, accusative, vocative — that reorganise word endings depending on grammatical role, a system that took me the better part of two years to stop actively dreading. Verb conjugations shift dramatically by person and tense, and there is no shortcut, no clever hack, no repeated-word plural trick waiting to save you. You simply have to put in the years.

And then, having put in the years, you discover that textbook Greek and lived Greek are only distant cousins. Village and island dialects carry vocabulary, cadence, and idiom that a classroom course never prepares you for — I moved to a small town outside Nafplio fluent enough, I thought, to get by, and spent my first month there genuinely unsure whether the local kafeneio regulars were speaking Greek or an elaborate prank. They were speaking Greek. Just not the Greek anyone teaches.

What redeems the whole punishing process is how deeply Greeks value the attempt, once you've clearly put in real effort rather than a token phrase or two — correction here isn't cold, it's an act of inclusion, delivered with the enthusiasm of someone who's decided you're worth teaching properly. My accent has been affectionately mocked by kiosk owners, taxi drivers, and my own landlord for years, and every single time it's been followed by an invitation to sit, have a coffee, and keep practicing. Greek will never let you feel effortlessly fluent. It will, eventually, let you feel truly known.

The Verdict

Indonesian wins on pure accessibility — no other language I've studied hands you functional competence this fast, and the social reward for trying is immediate and genuine. Greek wins on depth of connection, eventually, after a grammar-induced ordeal that tests your patience for years. If you want quick wins and instant social currency, Indonesia will spoil you rotten. If you want a language that makes you earn every ounce of belonging and rewards you tenfold once you have it, Greece will make you suffer beautifully. I regret neither fight.

What Nobody Warned You About

r/indonesia — "I said three wrong words in a warung and the owner clapped and gave me extra sambal, I have never felt so encouraged to keep learning anything"

r/greece — a thread titled "why does my yiayia neighbour speak a completely different Greek than Duolingo taught me" with 80 replies, all sympathetic

Internations Jakarta — an expat wrote that basic Bahasa got them through daily life in ten days flat, "faster than learning to use the office coffee machine"

Conclusion

Language learning abroad isn't really about grammar, it's about how a culture treats your failure while you're mid-sentence, mispronouncing everything. Indonesia treats it as delightful. Greece treats it as an ongoing, affectionate project spanning years. Both, in their own way, taught me more about humility than any classroom ever could. Pick your battle based on how much patience you actually have for being laughed at, kindly, on your way to belonging. I've done both. I'd do both again.