Learning Bahasa Indonesia - Tenses and Aspects

Fun fact: There is no tenses in Indonesian, so we'll just talk about aspects here! 😊

There are 3 aspects in Indonesian: simple, continuous, and perfect. We use the adverb "sedang" to make the verb continuous, and "sudah" to make the verb perfect. On the table below, the subject is Sarah, the object is apelnya (apel = apple, -nya = the), and the verb is beli (buy). In the active sentences, the prefix "meN-" (N changes depending on the first letter of the root word) is used on the verb. While in passive sentences, you add the prefix "di-" on the verb.

	Active	Passive
Simple	Sarah membeli apelnya	Apelnya dibeli Sarah
Continuous	Sarah sedang membeli apelnya	Apelnya sedang dibeli Sarah
Perfect	Sarah sudah membeli apelnya	Apelnya sudah dibeli Sarah

There's also one more adverb that I think is important for you to know, that is "belum". This adverb means "not yet" or "haven't". If you use this adverb, it means the verb is not yet done. Be careful, this adverb doesn't equal to "future" because "future" is a tense. As I mentioned previously, there are no tenses in Indonesian.

So, because there's no tenses, there’s no way to tell when it happened if you don’t know the context. So to add context, you can add time information words like kemarin (yesterday), sekarang (now), and besok (tomorrow) to the end of the sentence.

Past	Present	Future
Sarah makan apel kemarin	Sarah makan apel sekarang	Sarah makan apel besok

This rule also applies to Continuous, Perfect and Passive sentences. Just add those words at the end of the sentence. Easy! :D