Dokter gigi menemukan karies.

Dokter gigi means dentist.

Literally, it is doctor + tooth/teeth, so you can think of it as tooth doctor. This is a very common way Indonesian forms job titles and compound nouns: two nouns are placed together, and the first is understood through the second.

So:

• dokter = doctor
• gigi = tooth / teeth
• dokter gigi = dentist

In normal usage, you should learn dokter gigi as a fixed expression.

The word order is the very common Indonesian pattern:

Subject + Verb + Object

So here:

• Dokter gigi = subject
• menemukan = verb
• karies = object

This is directly parallel to English word order in a sentence like The dentist found caries or The dentist found a cavity.

Indonesian usually does not use articles like a, an, or the.

So:

• dokter gigi can mean a dentist or the dentist
• karies can mean caries, a cavity, or the cavity/cavities, depending on context

Context usually makes it clear.

If you really want to emphasize one dentist, you can say seorang dokter gigi, but in many normal sentences that is unnecessary.

It can correspond to any of those in English, depending on context.

Indonesian verbs do not usually change form for tense the way English verbs do. So menemukan itself does not tell you whether the action is present or past.

That means:

• menemukan can be interpreted as finds
• or found
• or sometimes is finding, depending on context

If a speaker wants to make the time clearer, they often add a time word, such as:

• kemarin = yesterday
• tadi = earlier
• sekarang = now
• besok = tomorrow

So without extra context, the sentence is tenseless in form.

Menemukan is built from the root temu, which relates to meeting or finding.

A useful breakdown is:

• temu = root
• meN- = an active verb prefix
• -kan = a suffix that often helps form transitive verbs

So menemukan means something like to find.

This is a very common Indonesian verb pattern. The meN- prefix often marks an active verb where the subject is doing the action.

Because the root begins with t, the prefix changes shape and the t disappears:

• temu → menemukan

This kind of sound change is normal in Indonesian word formation.

Roughly yes, but there is a small nuance.

Karies is the medical or technical term caries, meaning tooth decay. In everyday English, people often say a cavity instead.

So in learning materials, karies may be translated as:

• caries
• tooth decay
• sometimes a cavity

In a dental context, all of these are understandable, but karies is a more technical word than casual everyday English cavity.

It could be either, depending on context.

Indonesian nouns usually do not change form for singular vs. plural. So karies can mean:

• caries
• a cavity
• cavities

If the speaker wants to make plurality clearer, they might use context, numbers, or reduplication in some cases. But many nouns are simply left unmarked, especially when the meaning is already obvious.

In Indonesian, the object is usually understood from word order, not from case endings like in some other languages.

In this sentence:

• Dokter gigi comes before the verb, so it is understood as the subject
• karies comes after the verb, so it is understood as the object

Because Indonesian relies heavily on sentence position, you often do not need extra markers to show who is doing the action and what is receiving it.

Yes, absolutely.

Seorang dokter gigi menemukan karies means A dentist found/finds caries.

Adding seorang makes the subject explicitly one person and usually sounds more like a dentist rather than the dentist.

Compare:

• Dokter gigi menemukan karies. = The dentist found caries / A dentist found caries
• Seorang dokter gigi menemukan karies. = more clearly A dentist found caries

Both are grammatical. The version without seorang is very normal.

A simple approximate pronunciation is:

DOK-ter GEE-gee muh-nuh-MOO-kan KA-ree-es

A few notes:

• dokter: the o is like the o in off for many learners
• gigi: both g sounds are hard, as in go
• menemukan: stress is usually not as strong or contrastive as in English
• karies: pronounce all the vowels clearly: ka-ri-es

Indonesian spelling is fairly regular, so once you know the sound system, pronunciation is usually more predictable than in English.

As written, it is active.

The active verb is menemukan, and the subject doing the action is dokter gigi.

If you wanted a passive version, Indonesian would typically use ditemukan:

• Karies ditemukan dokter gigi.
• Karies ditemukan oleh dokter gigi.

These mean The caries was found by the dentist.

So the original sentence is straightforwardly active: The dentist found caries.