Breakdown of Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
Questions & Answers about Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
Memasakkan comes from memasak (to cook) + -kan, and it usually adds a benefactive meaning: doing the action for someone.
- memasak sup = to cook soup (neutral)
- memasakkan kami sup = to cook soup for us
By using memasakkan, the sentence highlights that Grandma is not just cooking; she is cooking for us. English often expresses this with word order or prepositions (“cook us soup”, “cook soup for us”), while Indonesian often uses -kan on the verb.
So:
Nenek memasak sup sayur hangat.
= Grandma cooks warm vegetable soup. (no explicit beneficiary)Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.
= Grandma cooks warm vegetable soup for us (we benefit from the action).
Yes, you can say:
- Nenek memasak sup sayur hangat untuk kami.
This is perfectly correct and natural. The difference is mainly in structure and slight nuance:
Structure:
memasakkan kami sup…
- Verb: memasakkan
- Beneficiary (indirect object): kami
- Thing cooked (direct object): sup sayur hangat
memasak sup… untuk kami
- Verb: memasak
- Direct object: sup sayur hangat
- Beneficiary expressed with preposition: untuk kami (for us)
Nuance:
- memasakkan kami sup…: the fact that it is for us is “built into” the verb. It can sound a bit more personal or “service‑oriented”.
- memasak sup… untuk kami: slightly more neutral; the for us is just added information with untuk.
In everyday conversation, both forms are common. The -kan form often feels a bit tighter and more idiomatic when there is a clear beneficiary.
In Indonesian, kinship terms like nenek, ibu, ayah, kakak, etc. are capitalized when they function like a proper name, i.e. as a direct form of address or a specific person’s title:
Aku akan pergi dengan Nenek.
= I’m going with Grandma. (our specific grandma → capitalized)Nenekku tinggal di Bandung.
= My grandmother lives in Bandung. (here nenekku is a common noun with a possessive; capitalization is less strict and often lowercase)
Compare:
- Saya bertemu ibu saya. (my mother, more generic, often lowercase)
- Saya bertemu Ibu tadi pagi. (I met Mom this morning → “Ibu” as her title/name, capitalized)
In Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah, Nenek is used like a name: “Grandma” (the specific grandma in the family), so it is capitalized.
Both kami and kita mean “we / us”, but they differ in inclusiveness:
- kami = we/us (not including the person spoken to)
- kita = we/us (including the person spoken to)
In the sentence:
- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
kami means the speaker + some others, but not the listener. So Grandma is cooking for us, but the person being talked to is not part of that group.
If you want to include the listener (e.g. “Grandma is cooking for all of us, including you”), you would say:
- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kita sup sayur hangat di rumah.
Malam ini literally means “this night / tonight”, with the pattern:
- [time noun] + ini → “this [time]”
- hari ini = today
- pagi ini = this morning
- malam ini = tonight
Ini malam is grammatical but usually means “this is night / this is evening” (as a predicate in a different structure), not “tonight” as a time adverbial.
In normal sentences, a time expression like malam ini can appear:
At the beginning (very common, gives time emphasis):
Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup…Or after the verb/objects:
Nenek memasakkan kami sup… malam ini.
Both are natural. Starting with Malam ini is a common way to set the scene: “Tonight, Grandma is cooking us warm vegetable soup at home.”
In Indonesian, modifiers normally come after the noun they modify.
Pattern:
- Noun + (descriptive noun) + adjective
So:
- sup = soup
- sup sayur = vegetable soup (literally “soup [of] vegetable”)
- sup sayur hangat = warm vegetable soup
Word-by-word:
- sup (main noun)
- sayur (what kind of soup? → vegetable soup)
- hangat (what is it like? → warm)
If you said hangat sup sayur, it would sound wrong or at least very unnatural, because Indonesian almost never puts descriptive adjectives before the noun the way English does.
Here, sup sayur hangat means “warm vegetable soup”.
- sup = soup
- sayur = vegetables, or a vegetable dish
- Together, sup sayur = soup whose main content is vegetables, i.e. vegetable soup.
The adjective hangat applies to the whole phrase sup sayur → “the vegetable soup is warm”.
So it is one dish, not “soup and vegetables” as two separate things. If you wanted to say “soup and vegetables” as two items, you would normally say:
- sup dan sayur yang hangat
(soup and warm vegetables)
But in the original sentence, sup sayur hangat is best understood as a single noun phrase: “warm vegetable soup”.
Di rumah means “at home / in the house”. A few points:
Necessity
It is not grammatically required. You could say:- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.
= Tonight Grandma is cooking us warm vegetable soup.
Adding di rumah just gives more information about the location.
- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat.
Whose house?
On its own, di rumah usually defaults to “at home” in a general sense – typically the speaker’s or shared family home, depending on context. It does not specify whose house grammatically.If you want to be explicit:
- di rumah Nenek = at Grandma’s house
- di rumah kami = at our house
Without extra context, di rumah here simply means “at home”, likely the family home where Grandma and “us” are.
Yes. Indonesian word order for adverbs of time and place is quite flexible.
All of these are grammatical:
- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
- Nenek malam ini memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
- Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah malam ini.
Typical preferences:
- Time expressions like malam ini often go at the beginning or end.
- Place expressions like di rumah often go after the object or at the end.
The first and third versions are the most natural in everyday speech. Changing the position mainly affects emphasis, not the core meaning.
Indonesian verbs do not change form for tense (no equivalent of “cook / cooked / will cook”). Instead, tense and time are usually conveyed by:
- Time words: malam ini, besok, tadi, kemarin, etc.
- Optional particles: sudah, sedang, akan, etc.
In:
- Malam ini Nenek memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
The phrase malam ini (“tonight”) is enough to tell you the time frame. In context, this can usually mean:
- will cook tonight (if said earlier in the day as a plan), or
- is cooking tonight (more general “this evening’s activity”).
If you want to be very explicit:
Akan for future:
Malam ini Nenek akan memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
= Tonight Grandma will cook us warm vegetable soup at home.Sedang for “currently in progress”:
Malam ini Nenek sedang memasakkan kami sup sayur hangat di rumah.
= (At some point tonight) Grandma is in the process of cooking us warm vegetable soup at home.
But in many cases, just “memasakkan” + a time expression is enough, and context clarifies whether it’s a plan or ongoing action.