as most of you know, i'm into learning languages, and particularly into trying out any method that might possibly make me learn them better or faster. for a few years now my theory has been that in order to make your mind as "flexible" as possible when it comes to language, you should learn in this manner:

become decent at esperanto —> a pidgin language —> a creole language —> learn a normal language

for example:
1. esperanto, 2. chinook jargon or toki pona, 3. indonesian, 4. japanese or icelandic or russian

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anyway, i read online that you can get to "business level" (as in, understand everything at work, in the news etc) in indonesian in 3 months; and by studying just 30 minutes a day you can get to conversational level (=90% of all normal stuff but not news or business meetings) in one month. if you live in indonesia. also read that no matter where you go in asia, if you know indonesian it looks really good on your CV since everyone does business or tourism with indonesia / malaysia. i had some idea of the first part but no idea about the last part - i guess learning indonesian will help me get jobs in japan.

two years ago is when i last looked at indonesian, attacking fanfic with a dictionary and making a word frequency list; i ended up learning rather a lot of common-use (in fanfic) words, but couldn't find any proper grammar explanations anywhere - the ones i found contradicted themselves or their own example words, etc. the indonesian-english dictionaries were also unusably bad. now i'm good enough at japanese to where i can use japanese materials for learning (which aren't that great but are better than the english ones anyway), and an exchange student (though we have no classes together) speaks at least some malaysian so i can ask him for help. the other cool thing is, i now have a smartphone that has an indonesian language option, so games and stuff will automatically use their indonesian translations.

so!!!! when i feel like it, in my free time, i'll start learning indonesian again. the truth is i want to make a contest out of this and see JUST how fast i can learn it (how far can i get in a month?!) but at this point i'm using japanese 5-7 hours a day (1.5 to 6 at school, then 1-4 hours reading or watching tv at home) and i don't really want to take away from that. i have to think about how much time i really want to "waste" on it...