Indonesian/Grammar/Verbs

Indonesian verbs do not change depending on tense, as in English. For example, English has different forms for "ate" (past tense) and "eat" (present tense), while Indonesian uses "makan" for both past and present. When it is important to specify time, Indonesian adds additional words that clarify the time, such as "sudah" (already), "masih" (still), and "akan" (will).

To be or not to be
To be is the most common English verb, yet its indonesian translation, adalah, is rarely used. This is particularly true when it is used to describe something/someone or to give characteristics. For instance : We can use adalah to make a statement that two things are equivalent. For instance: Another use of adalah is to say that something or someone is part of a grup/structure. For instance:
 * Aku cowok = I am a man
 * Dia gemuk = He is fat
 * Aku lapar = I am hungry
 * Rusia adalah negara terbesar di dunia.
 * Russia is the largest country in the world.
 * Dia adalah pengawai pemerintah
 * He is a government employee.

Inflection
The Indonesian verbs can be also inflected as well for passivity, causativity, etc.. Unlike its closely-related Tagalog, Indonesian and Malay conjugation system are more simplified, but more inflected than related Hawaiian and Maori. In Indonesian itself, the term "konjugasi" it is usually not used when talking about Indonesian, instead it is only used for foreign languages. The Indonesian conjugation is not inflected for tenses, but only for voice and moods (for the tenses, see /Grammar/Tenses, tenses are instead analytically formed). Nonetheless, it still has many exceptions, despite there are just very few affixes, mostly due to defectivity, for example berlari, memperlari, melarikan is acceptable, but not for *berlarii. Some cases may cause the verb forms change substantially (hijau "green" → menghijau "to become green" → terhijau "most green", instead of "accidentally became green", but terhijaukan "became greened"; tinggal "live" → meninggal "died").

Lemma forms of the verbs are always in the root (memakan ← makan "eat").

Affixes vertically, when in the case of suffix -lah, only can precede the suffix. Informally, the -kan suffix can be replaced with -in, and the meng- suffix is also replaced with their mutated first consonants (ny-, ng-, ...), resulting on these forms:

When transitive, the verb is also added with possessive suffixes:

Note: The prefix meng- are subject to the initial consonant change! (see also /prefix me)

Enseignement de l'indonésien/Grammaire/Verbes