Learning Bahasa Indonesia – Present, Past and Future Tense

The next step to learn Bahasa Indonesia is to understand the use of simple tense, past tense and future tense. How difficult it is to understand the tenses in Bahasa Indonesia? Lucky for you it is too simple actually.

Bahasa Indonesia is not using the change of verb in transforming it into past or future. That means you are using the same verb to say a word in present, future or past tense. Let’s take a look for an example below:

I ate hamburger yesterday = Saya makan hamburger kemarin

I am eating hamburger now = Saya makan hamburger sekarang

I want to eat hamburger tomorrow = Saya mau makan hamburger besok

The verb eat in Bahasa Indonesia (makan) never change in the form of past, present and future tense. You can identify an Indonesian sentence is present, past or future based on the use of time information word : kemarin / yesterday, now / sekarang, besok / tomorrow.

Everytime you hear the words of kemarin, sekarang, besok you can easily guess the sentence is past, present or future tense.

Some word of the time-information-word has synonym:

Besok similar to dua hari lagi (two more days), minggu depan (next week), etc

Now can you guess the following words (present, past or future tense):

1. Kemarin saya memancing di laut
2. Saya akan membeli mobil itu minggu depan
3. Saya rasa sekarang sedang hujan

Find out the answer on the next page