Breakdown of Saya melihat bintang jatuh di malam hari.
Questions & Answers about Saya melihat bintang jatuh di malam hari.
Indonesian verbs do not change form for tense. Instead, you rely on context or time markers. In Saya melihat bintang jatuh di malam hari, there’s no explicit past-tense marker; you just know it happened at night. If you want to emphasize it was completed in the past, you can add sudah or telah:
– Saya sudah melihat bintang jatuh.
Indonesian does not use articles. Indefiniteness or definiteness is understood from context.
– To say a shooting star, you simply say bintang jatuh.
– To say the shooting star, you can add itu (that): bintang jatuh itu.
Yes. Indonesian word order is quite flexible. The standard is Subject-Verb-Object plus adverbial phrases, but you can front the time phrase for emphasis or style:
Di malam hari, saya melihat bintang jatuh.
di malam hari means at night in a general sense.
tadi malam specifically means last night (i.e., the previous night). If you saw the shooting star last night, you could say:
Saya melihat bintang jatuh tadi malam.
– bintang is pronounced [bin-tahng], with the ng as in sing, and stress on the first syllable.
– jatuh is [jah-too], with a short a (as in father) and u as in put.
Keep each syllable clear—Indonesian doesn’t have strong stress accents like English.