Learn Hardcore Indonesian: Wartawan tertarik pada apa yang pembaca rasakan setelah membaca akhir cerita yang tidak bahagia. - The journalist is interested in what readers feel after reading an unhappy ending.

tertarik pada is very common in standard, neutral Indonesian for “interested in (something abstract)”
tertarik dengan is also heard a lot in everyday speech and is widely accepted
tertarik kepada tends to be used more for people, especially in a romantic/emotional sense (tertarik kepada dia = attracted/interested in him/her)

Here, the interest is in a topic (apa yang pembaca rasakan = what the readers felt), so tertarik pada sounds very natural and slightly more formal/neutral than tertarik dengan.

What is the function of yang in apa yang pembaca rasakan?

Yang introduces a kind of relative clause. Literally, you could break it down like this:

apa – what
yang pembaca rasakan – that the readers felt

So apa yang pembaca rasakan literally has the structure “what that the readers felt,” but in English we simply say “what the readers felt.”

In Indonesian, apa + yang + (clause) is the standard pattern for “what (someone) does/feels/knows,” etc. You can’t normally drop yang here; apa pembaca rasakan sounds incomplete or very informal/poetic at best.

Why is there no word for “that/the” before pembaca and cerita? How do I know it means “the readers” and “the story”?

Indonesian usually doesn’t use separate words for a/an/the. Nouns are often “bare,” and their definiteness (a vs the) is understood from context.

pembaca can mean “a reader,” “the reader,” or “readers”
cerita can mean “a story” or “the story”

In this sentence, context tells us:

pembaca is “the readers” (we’re talking about the specific audience of that story)
cerita is “the story” (a specific story that both speaker and listener know about)

If you really want to emphasize definiteness, you can add itu:

pembaca itu – that / the reader
cerita itu – that / the story

But you don’t have to do this; the original sentence is already natural and clear in context.

Why is it pada apa and not just apa after tertarik?

Because tertarik behaves like an adjective that takes a preposition, similar to “interested in” in English.

English: interested in what the readers felt
Indonesian: tertarik pada apa yang pembaca rasakan

If you say wartawan tertarik apa yang pembaca rasakan, it sounds ungrammatical, like saying “the journalist is interested what the readers felt” in English (missing the “in”).

Why is setelah membaca akhir cerita missing a subject? Shouldn’t it be setelah pembaca membaca akhir cerita?

Indonesian often omits repeated subjects in subordinate clauses when they’re obvious from context.

We already know the relevant subject is pembaca (“the readers”), so it’s natural to say:

apa yang pembaca rasakan setelah membaca akhir cerita
= what the readers felt after (they) read the end of the story

Just like in English we very naturally say:

“what the readers felt after reading the end of the story”

without saying “after they read…” again. The omitted subject is understood to be the same as pembaca.

Why is it akhir cerita and not something like akhir dari cerita or akhir cerita itu?

All of these are possible, but they differ in nuance:

akhir cerita – “the end of the story”; neutral, compact, very common
akhir cerita itu – “the end of that/the story”; more clearly definite/emphatic
akhir dari cerita – literally “the end from/of the story”; also grammatical, slightly longer and sometimes more formal-sounding

In everyday language, Noun + Noun is the default way to say “X of Y,” so akhir cerita is perfectly natural and probably the most common form.

Could akhir cerita yang tidak bahagia mean “the unhappy story’s ending” instead of “the unhappy ending of the story”?

In this sentence, the more natural interpretation is:

akhir cerita yang tidak bahagia = “the ending of the story, which is not happy”
→ “the story’s unhappy ending”

Structurally:

akhir cerita – the end of the story
yang tidak bahagia – an adjective clause modifying akhir

So yang tidak bahagia describes akhir, not cerita. If you wanted to say “the unhappy story’s ending” (a story that is unhappy overall), you would more likely restructure it, for example:

akhir dari cerita yang sedih itu – the end of that sad story

Why is tidak bahagia used instead of a separate word like “unhappy”?

Indonesian often forms the opposite of an adjective by adding tidak:

bahagia – happy
tidak bahagia – not happy / unhappy
puas – satisfied
tidak puas – dissatisfied / unsatisfied

There is a word tidak bahagia functioning as “unhappy,” but it’s just the straightforward “not happy.” There’s no single common prefix that directly turns bahagia into its opposite the way un- does in English, so tidak bahagia is the normal choice.

What’s the difference between merasakan, merasa, and merasakan vs rasakan here (pembaca rasakan)?

Base word: rasa – taste / feeling.

merasa – to feel (intransitive; no direct object needed)
- Saya merasa sedih. – I feel sad.
merasakan – to feel/experience something (transitive; takes a direct object)
- Saya merasakan kebahagiaan. – I feel/experience happiness.
rasakan is the me- verb in a reduced form used in object-focus or in relative-clause patterns, like here.

In apa yang pembaca rasakan:

It comes from pembaca merasakan apa – the readers feel/experience what
In the apa yang … relative-clause structure, the verb appears as rasakan, and the object (apa) moves to the front.

So apa yang pembaca rasakan literally corresponds to “what (it is that) the readers feel/experience.”

How do we know the time reference for rasakan and membaca? There’s no past tense marker, but the English translation is in the past.

Indonesian verbs are not marked for tense (past/present/future) the way English verbs are. Time is usually understood from:

context
time adverbs (e.g. kemarin, nanti, sekarang)
other parts of the sentence

Here, setelah membaca akhir cerita (“after reading the end of the story”) signals that this action is completed relative to the journalist’s interest, so in natural English we phrase it in the past:

“what the readers felt after reading the unhappy ending”

In Indonesian, the same verb forms rasakan and membaca could be used in other contexts with present or future time, depending on adverbs and context.