Resources for learning Malay
From what I know, it seems a lot of the material for Bahasa Melayu is from the 20th century. Don’t get me wrong, there are some recent resources, which I mention below, from which you can study. However, it might be best to supplement Bahasa Melayu with some Bahasa Indonesia and comparing the differences.
Books
- Complete Malay, Beginner to Intermediate. I think it’s cheaper if you can find the kindle version, which I obtained from the .co.uk version of amazon here.
- Colloquial Malay. Though reviews have found that the malay used in this book is Formal Malay, which is the Malay used in official streams, rather than colloquial Malay.
- With some reading experience from either two books above, you could start on Mastering Malay.
- First Indonesian / Malay Reader for Beginners: Bilingual for Speakers of English: 1, also useful for Bahasa Indonesia
Websites
- Singapore’s Berita Harian, a newspaper written in Malay, has a nifty auto-translate function that works when you highlight the words.
Youtube
- I Wanna Learn Malay. Good videos on grammar points and when to use certain words in Malay. Also gives a diverse number of sentence examples.
- Sierra Lisse. This channel is inactive at time of writing (March 2022), but Sierra’s archives on learning Malay is very helpful. I quite like her later videos where she speaks Malay in a real setting, such as while going out to eat with her family. They come with a good translation into English with explanation!
- Tina Amir. I personally was not attracted to her videos, but she has helped people learn Malay, and perhaps she can help you too.