Reddit mentions of Instant Indonesian: How to express 1,000 different ideas with just 100 key words and phrases! (Instant Phrasebook Series)

• The Straight Dope on Bahasa Indonesia While this isn't a formal treatment and some parts are outdated, I found this really useful when first learning Bahasa. The section titled "The twenty questions" actually became the most valuable part of the document. Almost every single time I met a new person, I would get asked these questions.
  
• Northern Illinois University has a good number of resources including Indonesian in 7 Days and an Overview of Indonesian Grammar and Morphology. These should help you get an idea of Indonesian's use of prefixes, suffixes, and affixes.
  
• While there are a lot of Indonesian phrase books, I found Instant Indonesian to be particularly helpful in the early stages. The examples are organized in a manner that helped me rapidly generalize about the language and expand beyond just the basic phrases. Think of this as a collection of templates to start your education.
  
• While Tuttle's Concise Indonesian Dictionary is not very comprehensive, I carried it in my backpack almost every day during my first few months in Indonesia.
  
• The English to Indonesian and Indonesian to English dictionaries by Echols and Shadily are the definitive dictionaries, but they can be a bit pricey outside of Indonesia. Inside any Gramedia in Indonesia you can get each one for around 15-20$US.
  
• The best online dictionary I've found is Sederet especially now that KEBI (Kamus Besar Indonesia) seems to be down.
  
• Wikibooks also has a pretty good introduction with links to other resources
  
• Lastly the collection of books by John Wolff are a bit dry, but they are also the most in depth for really learning the details of the language.
  
  Good luck learning bahasa. It's a fun, accessible language, and knowing just a little bit will really go a long way towards bringing yourself closer to the people of Indonesia.

I think you're right and wrong at the same time about how difficult it is to learn Indonesian.

The American 'FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE' lists Indonesian as harder to learn than most of the major European languages: https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/

However, this is only true if you're learning formal, correct Indonesian. IMHO, it's probably the easiest language in the world to learn for practical, everyday use.

Here's the steps I took to learn practical, everyday, Indonesian.

1. Forget learning grammar. If you really do achieve fluency for practical Indonesian, you can always learn it later.
   
   
2. Listen to audio lessons in the shower everyday: https://www.learningindonesian.com/
   
   
3. Learn the most useful 100 words: https://www.amazon.com/Instant-Indonesian-express-different-Phrasebook/dp/0804833710
   
   That's it!
   
   Well . . . not really, but you need to be honest with yourself about the likelihood of remembering words and concepts you have no practical use for.
   
   The only reason I was able to retain what I learned was because I live in Indonesia and really NEED to know the language to get by.