Learn Hardcore Indonesian: Hari ini ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat setelah kami pulang berjoging. - Today Father cooks warm vegetable soup for us after we come home from jogging.

How do we know this sentence is talking about something that already happened today, if the verb memasakkan doesn’t change form like English “cooked”?

Indonesian verbs generally do not change form for tense (past / present / future). Instead, time is shown by:

Time expressions like hari ini (today), kemarin (yesterday), besok (tomorrow), etc.
Optional aspect words like sudah (already), sedang (in the middle of), akan (will).

In this sentence:

Hari ini sets the time as “today”.
The context (father already cooked after you came back) makes it clear it’s a completed action earlier today, even though the verb form memasakkan itself doesn’t show past tense.

If you really wanted to emphasize that it’s already done, you could also say:

Hari ini ayah sudah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat…

What’s the difference between memasak and memasakkan here?

Both come from the root masak (to cook):

memasak = to cook (basic action)
memasakkan = to cook something for someone (benefactive meaning)

In ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat:

ayah = subject (father)
memasakkan = cooked (for)
kami = the people he cooked for (indirect object / beneficiary)
sup sayur hangat = what he cooked (direct object)

With memasak (without -kan), you’d normally say:

Ayah memasak sup sayur hangat untuk kami.
“Dad cooked warm vegetable soup for us.”

With memasakkan, the “for us”/“for someone” idea is built into the verb itself, so you can say:

Ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.

Both are correct; memasakkan sounds a bit more explicitly “doing it for someone’s benefit”.

Why is it memasakkan kami sup sayur, not memasakkan sup sayur kami?

Because kami in this sentence is the person the action is done for, not ownership of the soup.

memasakkan kami sup sayur
= “cooked vegetable soup for us”

If you say:

memasakkan sup sayur kami

it will naturally be understood as:

“cooked our vegetable soup” (our soup, maybe we owned it already),

not “cooked (some) vegetable soup for us”.

So:

[verb + -kan] + person + thing
→ person = beneficiary
→ thing = what is done for them.

Could I also say Ayah memasak sup sayur hangat untuk kami or kepada kami instead of using memasakkan kami sup sayur?

Yes, you can use memasak … untuk kami:

Ayah memasak sup sayur hangat untuk kami.
This is very natural and common.

Using kepada is unusual with memasak, because kepada is more for giving things or addressing people (letters, speeches):

memberi buku kepada kami (give a book to us)
berbicara kepada kami (speak to us)

So:

memasak … untuk kami ✅ natural
memasak … kepada kami ❌ sounds wrong or unnatural
memasakkan kami … ✅ also natural, slightly more “benefactive” in form.

Why does the sentence use kami instead of kita?

Both kami and kita mean “we / us”, but:

kami = we/us without the listener (excludes the person you’re talking to)
kita = we/us including the listener

In this sentence, kami means “we/us (but not you, the person I’m talking to)”. So it implies:

The people who went jogging and got soup are a group that doesn’t include the listener.

If you wanted to include the person you’re talking to (for example, you and your friend are talking about the same jogging and soup you both had), you would say:

Hari ini ayah memasakkan kita sup sayur hangat…

Is there any difference between ayah and bapak here?

Both can refer to “father / dad”, but they differ in use and tone:

ayah
- Neutral, can feel a bit “standard” or slightly bookish
- Often used in writing, storytelling, or as a family term depending on the family.
bapak (often shortened to pak in speech)
- As “father”: used as a family term in many households
- Very common as a polite form of address to adult men (like “Sir” or “Mr.”)

In the sentence:

Hari ini ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat…

using ayah just tells us “Father / Dad” in a neutral way. You could also say:

Hari ini bapak memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat…

if in that family they call their father bapak. Both are grammatically fine; choice depends on personal/family style and regional habits.

In sup sayur hangat, which word does hangat describe? The soup, the vegetables, or both?

Structurally, sup is the main noun, and sayur and hangat modify it:

sup = head noun
sayur = describes the type of soup (vegetable soup)
hangat = describes the soup’s temperature (warm)

So:

sup sayur hangat ≈ “warm vegetable soup”

hangat here is best understood as describing the soup (as a whole), not just the vegetables.

Because of Indonesian noun phrase order:

The adjective hangat comes after the noun phrase it modifies.

You can’t naturally say:

❌ hangat sup sayur

The correct, natural order is:

✅ sup sayur hangat

Why does hangat come after sup sayur instead of before, like English “warm soup”?

In Indonesian, adjectives almost always come after the noun:

rumah besar = big house
buku baru = new book
kopi panas = hot coffee

So:

sup sayur hangat literally follows the pattern [noun] [modifier] [adjective]:
- sup (soup)
- sayur (vegetable → type of soup)
- hangat (warm → describes the soup)

Putting hangat before the noun (like English) is not grammatical in Indonesian.

What exactly does berjoging mean, and how is it different from just joging or jogging?

joging (from English “jogging”) is treated as a base word/loan in Indonesian.
With the prefix ber-, it becomes berjoging, which is the standard verb form meaning “to jog”.

So:

berjoging = “to go jogging / to jog” (a proper Indonesian verb form)

People also often say jogging or joging in casual speech:

Kami habis jogging.
Kami habis joging.

But in more careful or formal Indonesian, berjoging or lari pagi (morning run) might be preferred.

In your sentence:

setelah kami pulang berjoging
= “after we came back from jogging”
(literally, “after we came home jogging”).

Why is it pulang berjoging without a preposition like “from”, unlike English “came back from jogging”?

In Indonesian, it’s common to put two verbs together without a preposition when the second one gives extra information about the first:

pulang bekerja = go home from work
pulang sekolah = go home from school
pulang belanja = come home from shopping

Similarly:

pulang berjoging = come/go home (after) jogging

You could also say more explicitly:

setelah kami pulang dari berjoging
setelah kami pulang dari joging/jogging

but pulang berjoging is short, natural, and perfectly correct.

Can I move the setelah clause to the front, like Setelah kami pulang berjoging, hari ini ayah…?

Yes. With conjunctions like setelah (“after”), you can put the time clause before or after the main clause:

Hari ini ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat setelah kami pulang berjoging.
Setelah kami pulang berjoging, hari ini ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.

Both are grammatically correct.

Natural-sounding options people might prefer:

Setelah kami pulang berjoging, ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.
(Often you’d drop hari ini because setelah
- context already makes the time clear.)

Position affects emphasis a little (what you want to highlight first) but doesn’t change the basic meaning.

Should we add sudah before memasakkan, like ayah sudah memasakkan kami…, to show it’s finished?

You can, but you don’t have to.

Ayah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat…
→ can already mean “Dad cooked us warm vegetable soup…” (in context, it’s past).
Ayah sudah memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat…
→ explicitly stresses that the action is already completed (“has already cooked”).

In the original sentence, hari ini plus the “after we came back jogging” clause already makes the timeline clear, so sudah is optional emphasis, not required for correctness.