I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
I assumed this meant high school or earlier (18 and under). Most kids I grew up with (including myself) wouldn't be mature enough to do this without explicit instruction (and some policing!). That is why I want to understand more. Example: Did they have a big school meeting where they explained to local kids: "There are bunch of war refugees coming. Here are some things we can do to make them feel more welcome. First: Don't criticize their accent when they are speaking Flemish/Dutch." It is also interesting from the lens of Belgian linguistic culture, as the country is broadly divided north is Flemish, south is French and a tiny part is German.
So "not being a dick" really does need an explanatory framework in your world (and an elaborate one, with mostly irrelevant detail). That's.......a shame.
The problem here is just that upthread Muromec said “it’s that I want to gatekeep” when surely they meant “don’t,” and now there’s a whole chain of misunderstanding.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
> Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
We have the same in dutch, but, surprise twist: it is often the dutch that get it wrong. And indeed, it is confusing, but then again, it is just a bit of noise injected into the bitstream and easily worked around once you attune to that particular speaker.
Note that for people not attuned to a language some differences that are clear as day to the natives are absolutely inaudible.
The difference between 'kas' and 'kaas' in dutch is obvious to me and if your language uses stressed vowels it probably is obvious to you too but if your language skills do not yet include that difference you will not even hear these as two different words.
Why is this downvoted? This is a nice addition to the conversation. I see the same with Cantonese speakers. If you ask native speakers from Hongkong, Macao, and Guangdong, all of them will say "the other sounds weird"... but they work it out. And all three groups are happy to listen to a foreigner speak Canto (yes, there are a few). All will probably say: "Weird accent, but I understand what they are saying." Plus, Canto language communities probably exist in over 50 countries in the world. All of them will have slight tonal differences.
As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
As a foreigner living in Japan, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know that it's not ethnocentrism, but that Japan is for the most part quite xenophobic, and racist. It's common to hear Japanese folks make fun of other people's accents in what should be obviously extremely inappropriate settings, like at work, for example. The fact that you consider this ethnocentrism furthers the point that xenophobia and racism is commonplace, and that you feel that it's on foreigners to accept it.
If you're nitpicking a foreigner's accent pitch, think about how it would make you feel if they nitpicked your english pronunciation. My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Yes, I also find it hilarious (in any culture) when someone is critical of a foreign speaker. Then when that person speaks a foreign language, usually their accent and style is so predictably awful that people are hiding under their desks. That is why I made the joke about asking natives: "So, how is your Thai... or German?" Those two languages are pretty rare to hear in Japan, especially for non-native speakers. It acts as the perfect monkeywrench in their gears.
> My wife points out when I make mistakes in Japanese, but I ask her to do so. If a coworker or stranger were to do so, it would be embarrassing, and that's the difference that matters.
Another great point. In my experience, the very best language lessons are from casual interactions when a stranger makes a correction to my foreign language when replying me, but not in a derogatory manner. Most of the time, you can tell they are trying to be subtle and give you a helpful hint.
I mean there are widely spoken regional dialects that make no pitch distinction between the pronounciation of 橋 and 箸. You may get looked down on for not speaking the Queen's English (I mean standard Tokyo Japanese) but you are still speaking fully correct Japanese.
This is exactly why I say it is nothing but cultural/linguistic gatekeeping. Even natives between regions disagree on the "correct" way to pronouce these terms. This further proves to me how little Japanese varies throughout the country. It is freakishly regular for the size of Japan.
Consider a place like UK with four constituent countries: England, Wales, Scotland, and North Ireland (not to mention the channel islands and other oddities). They range of accents (without huge mountain ranges!) is wildly different. And the change in vocabulary for vernacular speech is far larger than the United States, which Google AI tells me is 40x larger(!).
Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
I speak Japanese and am fully aware of the dynamic you describe, having experienced it many times, first hand. I’ve also been truly misunderstood as a result of the wrong use of accent, difference in dialect, etc.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors).
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate.
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
> Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read?
Not even close to be frankly honest.
Leaving aside the delibrate silliness of Edward Lear, Roald Dahl, et al and focusing just on origin stories relating to the spread of various beliefs ...
* Have you heard the one about the Buddist Monk, the Monkey, Pig, Fish, Dragon, and Horse spirits ?
* the tale of a great snake that carved rivers ?
* maybe that fishing boat passenger that got out and walked across the water ?
> If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders
I suspect the marriage was political .. but he wasn't marrying into a family of arab traders, Sultan Malikussaleh (the progenitor of the Samudera Pasai Sultanate) was an Acehnese man from part of what is now called Sumatra, a part of Indonesia.
> special access to the arab trading network
Was pretty low key wrt volume between the modern middle east and Indonesia back in the time we are looking at - the trade advantages by volume (ie. that which mattered) was all local to the greater archipelago.
Moreover, returning to the original point upthread, there's no evidence of colonisation by arabs in the sense of colonisation by the British of India or various parts of Africa, colonisation by the Dutch in the East Indies, colonisation by the Germans in Africa and PNG, by the French in Vietnam, etc.
No. But Arabs didn't colonize the Malay islands. They just adopted Islam from their internal politics. Not sure why this triggered you, pretty much everybody is a colonizer.
The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
>Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
Made me remember again how disappointed I was (food-wise) that time I went backpacking in the Philippines after backpacking in Thailand. Most days we had to choose between dry rice with tasteless fried chicken, or tasteless fried chicken with dry rice.
I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.
Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
Not only is Burmese food in Myanmar far better, but even the small, modest restaurants bring out a whole spread of complimentary small dishes (pickles, salads, crunchy snacks, all kinds of delicious little sides) before the main meal. It's just built into the dining culture there, and it's incredibly generous compared to what you see abroad.
Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
I offer a practical template: <Large city in developing country X> has a noise problem.
When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc
I lived in Japan 2x long than you. You just said you lived near stations so there you go. Of course it’s loud next to the station. Walk 3 minutes perpendicular to the station and it’s silent
I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.
I've known a few younger people who can't go into shops they used to do their part-time work (バイト) at, simply because the looped jingles did, in fact, drive them nuts.
Catholic churches ring bells twice a day. It's less then mosques that do their call 5 times a day both as non-religious person both are disappointing to me.
> Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
Bangkok doesn't have nearly the noise issues of Jakarta; the traffic proceeds without every vehicle beeping most of the time in Bangkok. Also no prayer calls.
Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
BLACKWATER
Angwi fled his mountain home, the soldiers, as they burnt his village down, near the border line.
He’s left the card games by the valley fire, the stories that his uncle told, the stories old, the spirits past.
He’s seen the land taken away and given to the Java men; they’ve flown them in from distant lands.
Angwi fears for his people’s songs, the nights they danced the valley strong; the hunding grounds, steep mountain side.
slash and burn
Is there any place you can go now that isn't doing a genocide? USA is out, Europe is out, Russia is out, China is out. Obviously the middle east is out. Most of Africa. Australia? They're strongly aligned with the USA though. And they did one in the past. Tiny Pacific islands but they're basically USA colonies?
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
Somebody I know had asthma while she lived in Jakarta. It went away when she moved to Europe. I really liked Jakarta, but the air quality is one of the reasons why I won't go back again.
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
I guess we just have different experience of Manila. In most places you would go as a visitor, either tourist or business, you're not really likely to see a lot of violence. I've been there 10 times over 10 years, and really nothing truly bad happened or even seen or heard by fellow travellers. I've been harassed by street kids, that's about it.
Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.
Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.
But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.
> I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
The parent mentions the DTV visa which is the opposite of the visa-run strategy. Realistically though, if you're a "nomad" from a country with a powerful-ish passport you can come to Thailand for 60 days, extend once for 30 days for a total stay of 90 days. After that you can do a bit of a loop between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines in whatever order you prefer and come back to Thailand in a year. They'll have no problem letting you in again.
It's pretty easy to spend a year in SEA without raising eyebrows at any border if you're willing to change countries somewhat often and don't mind AirAsia flights.
That is basically my life. I've visited almost every country in the region this year (+ China and Japan) on a tourist visa.
The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
"Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
> "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this
you can absolutely do this. Once you learn how to live there and design your own routes with motorbike taxis, sky train etc you do save a lot of time. It's still quite bad but it's 20 minutes vs 2 hours sort of better.
Every time I tried taking a motorbike taxi, they charged me probably three times more than a local to just travel maybe 1km, not to mention Bangkok has one of the deadliest roads in the world, if not the deadliest. I have explored pretty much all of Bangkok and I don't think the MRT and BTS are as convenient as some people make it out to be. It is built as it is in any other city where it's very concentrated around the city centre but anything right outside of that is terrible.
Also, for two weeks in December you have the Red Cross festival. I challenge you to schedule your day every single day to avoid that mass of hell if you live anywhere in a 2km radius of that. Even if you call a tuktuk or a motorbike, they will absolutely NOT come to get you if they think there's too much traffic, or worse, they will tell you to get off somewhere where it's convenient for them.
Like a lot of foreigners, you seem to have built your life avoiding many things in Bangkok, which you can do in any city, but that's not the point. You are compensating for how poorly the city is built and how poorly the city is ran. A city is not appealing if you have to self-impose so many restrictions and find so many workarounds.
This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
I agree it's hard to explain why Singapore is so dull. I go there every year or so as that's where the closest Lithuanian embassy is and the entire country feels like a shopping mall.
It's a great example how "on paper" metrics don't match reality but it's hardly surprising given that manipulating paper is the entire function of the country.
Lots of people labouring under weak and old stereotypes here...
I wonder what people would think if I said that about London, if I only visited central London and said 'it feels like a tourist trap'. London is huge, as is Singapore (for a city, it's pretty big— it has a larger population than all of the Baltics and the Nordic except Sweden).
Oh, for goodness' sake, drop the melodrama and hyperbole. I take it you haven't lived in the country either.
Singapore is not North Korea, the PRC, or any of the Gulf countries, where people just get disappeared (or sawn into pieces and stuffed into a suitcase) for 'criticising the government' or 'criticising the country'.
I am Singaporean.
I can absolutely call the ruling People's Action Party a bunch of ivory tower-dwelling bureaucrats who have lost touch with the issues of the populace, and are mostly far cry from Lee Kuan Yew's days. I can say that Ms Josephine Teo really needs to keep her mouth shut, and that Mr Ng Chee Meng, MP for Jalan Kayu, didn't deserve to win his constituency one jot. I can say the ruling party regularly gerrymander the districts so they keep winning, even though they deny it. I can say they stifle the development of creative pursuits and the arts with their heavy-handed censorship. I can say they have their vices backwards by being extremely light on drink-driving, but simultaneously extremely harsh on cannabis, which smells horrible but isn't a big problem in terms of addiction or withdrawal.
I can say they are strongly influenced by Anglospheric right-wing Christian evangelism, and they need to root it out before it settles too deep into the country's psyche. I can say they are trying to build a cult of personality of Lee Kuan Yew, who has been dead for 10 years; it's time the country, the government, and the ruling party built on his legacy and moved forward instead of circling around him and his memory.
If you want more criticism, how about actually watching the Singapore Parliament, and deciding for yourself?
Oh, and if you ever decide to drop by, leave the hard drugs at home (including weed), if you want to leave with your head on its neck.
As for metrics: Singapore is both on paper and in reality a pretty good place to live, if you can stand the humidity and heat (frankly, that's the only truly oppressive thing about the place, how ruddy hot it gets). Why do you think people still emigrate to it, from lower-income countries, and from the West?
And finally, 'bald JD Vance', I don't understand how US politics is related to Singapore. They are countries hemispheres apart. One occupies a full third of a continent and has a population of 350 million. The other is a tiny island city-state of 6 million.
The politics of the US have also degraded to something worse than sports rivalries and the discourse is generally of extremely poor quality; it is only a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of its leadership and the majority of its people.
I agree with everything you say, however I would note that Singapore has a substantial resident (ordinary definition of the word) population on various types of work permits who, rightly or wrongly, don't feel so free to speak out as you do.
A substantial proportion of those would like to become PR or even citizens, but can't risk prejudicing an already-opaque process in doing so.
> you need to make local friends to really get into it
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
I don't feel that AQI in reasonably normal ranges corresponds at all to the subjective experience of how nice the air feels to breathe.
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
Are you from Mumbai? or a place with notably bad AQI? Do you smoke?
Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on earth, many people report being unable to perform aerobic exercise or describe breathing the air as being similar to smoking.
I'm from a place with excellent AQI (semi-rural Sweden). I do not smoke. I usually don't mind when other people smoke, but I don't like how they smell just after finishing. :-)
I know that the Mumbai air is not healthy, but my subjective experience of it was very positive.
> it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
That's a wild comparison, makes me wonder how much time you spent in Bangkok. Bangkok has a much higher standard of living compared to Jakarta, and I've yet to meet anyone who spent more than a month in both places and prefers Jakarta. Living costs are cheaper in Jakarta for sure, but that's about it.
I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
A local beer in a bar will normally be around 60k IDR so $3-4, wine is more expensive generally in SEA you'll normally pay around 90-100k IDR per glass.
If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground.
Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.