Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini.

The rice plants in the field look bright green this morning.

Breakdown of Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini.

• di: in
• kelihatan: to look
• pagi ini: this morning
• hijau: green
• cerah: bright
• sawah: the rice field
• padi: rice

Questions & Answers about Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini.

What’s the difference between padi, beras, and nasi?

Indonesian has different words for rice depending on its form and stage:

• padi: rice as a plant in the field, or the harvested but still unhusked grains (paddy).

  • Used in contexts like farming, rice fields, agriculture.
  • Example: Padi di sawah = the rice plants in the field.

• beras: uncooked rice grains (after husking, before cooking).

  • What you buy in a bag at the store.

• nasi: cooked rice, ready to eat.

  • Example: nasi goreng = fried rice.

So in the sentence, padi is correct because we’re talking about rice in the field, as plants.

Is di sawah “in the rice field” or “at the rice field”? How is di used?

di is a preposition that generally corresponds to “in / at / on”, depending on context. It marks location.

• di + place = in/at/on that place
  • di rumah = at home
  • di meja = on the table
  • di sawah = in the rice field / at the rice field

English forces you to choose between in / at / on, but Indonesian just uses di, and the exact English preposition is understood from context.

So Padi di sawah can be translated as “The rice in the field” or “The paddy in the rice field”.

What’s the difference between kelihatan, terlihat, and nampak?

All of them can mean “to be visible” or “to look / appear”, but there are nuances:

• kelihatan

  • Everyday, neutral, slightly informal.
  • Often used to mean “looks/appears (to be)”:
    • Dia kelihatan lelah. = He looks tired.

• terlihat

  • Slightly more formal/neutral.
  • Can mean “is visible” or “can be seen”.
    • Gunung itu terlihat jelas. = That mountain is clearly visible.

• nampak

  • Similar to terlihat, also “appears / is visible”.
  • Slightly literary or regional in feel, but also common in speech.

In Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini, kelihatan works like “looks / appears”:
“The paddy in the field looks bright green this morning.”

Is kelihatan a verb or an adjective? How should I think of it?

Kelihatan functions as a stative verb meaning roughly “to be seen / to look”.

The pattern is:

• Subjek + kelihatan + adjective
  • Dia kelihatan sedih. = He looks sad.
  • Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah. = The paddy looks bright green.

Grammatically, you can treat kelihatan as a verb that links the subject to a state or quality, similar to “looks” in English.

Why is it hijau cerah and not cerah hijau? What’s the adjective order?

In Indonesian, adjectives almost always come after the noun, and multiple adjectives usually come in a fairly free order, but some combinations are more natural than others.

Here, hijau cerah is understood as:

• hijau = green
• cerah = bright / vivid / clear

Together they form a kind of adjective phrase: “bright green” / “vivid green”.

Putting cerah hijau would sound odd. Think of cerah as modifying the quality of the color green, not of some other property, so “green (which is) bright” = hijau cerah.

In practice, color + quality word often appear as:

• merah tua = dark red
• biru muda = light blue
• hijau cerah = bright green

Could the sentence be Pagi ini padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah instead? Is that still correct?

Yes, that’s also correct.

Both:

• Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini.
• Pagi ini padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah.

are natural. Indonesian word order is quite flexible for time expressions:

• Pagi ini (this morning) can go at the beginning or end of the sentence.
• Putting it at the beginning slightly emphasizes the time: “This morning, the paddy in the fields looks bright green.”

How do I know this sentence is present tense? There’s no tense marker.

Indonesian doesn’t have verb conjugations for tense like English (look / looked / will look). Tense is usually understood from:

• Time words:

  • pagi ini = this morning (present-ish, close to now)
  • tadi pagi = this morning (earlier, already past)
  • besok = tomorrow

• Context and shared knowledge.

In Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini, the phrase pagi ini suggests now / this morning, so we translate it in the present:
“The paddy in the rice field looks bright green this morning.”

If you said tadi pagi, it would feel more clearly past:
Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah tadi pagi. = The paddy looked bright green this morning (earlier).

What’s the difference between pagi ini and tadi pagi?

Both refer to “this morning”, but with a nuance:

• pagi ini

  • “this morning” as part of today, still relatively current or relevant.
  • Often used while the morning is still going on, or when you’re focusing on “today’s morning” in general.

• tadi pagi

  • “this morning” but clearly in the past, already over.
  • Often used later in the day:
    
    • Tadi pagi saya bangun terlambat. = I woke up late this morning.

In the sentence, pagi ini suggests we’re talking about this morning as a current situation (or at least in a neutral descriptive way).

Does padi here mean “the rice plants” in general, or a specific field of rice?

Indonesian nouns don’t automatically mark singular or plural. Padi here can mean:

• “rice (as a crop) in the rice fields” in general
  or
• “the rice plants in the field” referring to a specific field, depending on context.

If you wanted to emphasize many fields, you could say:

• Padi di sawah-sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini.
  = The rice in the fields looks bright green this morning.

The base sentence is naturally understood as “the rice plants in the (local/visible) rice field(s) look bright green this morning.”

Can cerah be used for colors like this? I thought it was for weather.

Cerah is very commonly used for weather:

• Cuaca hari ini cerah. = The weather is clear / bright today.

But it can also describe brightness or vividness in other contexts, including colors:

• warna hijau cerah = bright green
• baju kuning cerah = bright yellow shirt

So using cerah with hijau is natural and means the green is bright, vivid, not dull.

Could I drop di and say Padi sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini?

No, that would sound wrong or at least very odd.

• Sawah is a place noun (rice field).

• Indonesian normally uses the preposition di to mark a location:

  • Padi di sawah = rice (plants) in the rice field(s).

Without di, padi sawah would look more like a compound noun, suggesting a special type of paddy called “sawah paddy”, which isn’t how the phrase is used in standard Indonesian.

So keep di: padi di sawah.

Is there any implied “the” or “a” in padi di sawah? How do articles work here?

Indonesian does not have articles like “a / an / the”. Whether you translate it as “the paddy” or “the rice plants” or “rice plants” or “the rice in the fields” depends on:

• context, and
• what sounds natural in English.

In this sentence, Padi di sawah kelihatan hijau cerah pagi ini is best rendered as:

• “The paddy in the rice fields looks bright green this morning.”
  or
• “The rice plants in the rice field(s) look bright green this morning.”

English requires an article, so we add it in translation, but it’s not present in the Indonesian.