I would like to learn Bahasa Indonesian sometime. But I've found that the only way I really like to study is to read a book I know in the foreign tongue. Or maybe watch a movie.
I cannot figure out how to search books in different languages in Amazon. Are there any other methods?

It's weird, it seems like Indonesian gets very little attention as a foreign language for how many people speak it.

I can't think of any Indo books off of the top of my head, but perhaps beware because lots of Indonesian media can be based off of dialects or related languages (e.g. Javanese - that said, Javanese has many speakers too ).

One movie I personally enjoyed, of the sort of zany comedy genre is Jagad X Code, beware of the lower quality sound and audio despite being released recently (and the Javanese, local lingo, and the big-baddy who speaks very funky English). Looking in the subcatergory on wikipedia "Indonesian Literature", I also found this and had a bit of a laugh, as your country code is US I assume you might find this interesting (or, conversely, a bit humorous): Obama Anak Menteng (Menteng-Kid Obama).

Additionally, anything in Javanese or Malay will help (but as much as learning Spanish may help someone learn Portuguese or Italian).

Indonesian I feel suffers from a combination of "can't-nuke-us" syndrome (no major threat) and being culturally removed from the majority of the Western World, spare the Netherlands (who are somewhat not liked by Indonesia for their past colonial interests in the area) and Australia (who are delicately tolerated, as we're neighbours, tourists, but also critics), and maybe a few other countries. The US has little involvement with the archipelago.

Arabic would be in the same category if it weren't for oil, radical Islam, and Israel, and similarly I assume many Indian languages are attention depraved compared to say Chinese, because of the proliferation of English there, the fact that India doesn't manufacture like China does for the rest of the world, and because India is relatively peaceful to the rest of the world (they might be a bit peeved at Australia too though.. Thank God Sino-Australian relationships are joyous ). But like how India's space program is probably going to run laps around NASA in the next 50 years, the whole eastern region as a whole is accelerating in growth, so expect Indonesian culture to also start proliferating a bit more than usual.

(sorry I can't give you more resources, I'm not a fluent Indonesian speaker by any stride, so I'm not very in the know when it comes to literature).

Thanks for your reply. I feel like they must at least have Alice in Wonderland or something. If not, someone should definitely bring it to them.

My uncle's partner is Indonesian and I've been meaning to learn the language for a while. He got me a translation of the first Harry Potter book in Indonesian (but I'm not sure it's even official and that you could buy it outside of Indonesia)

Good luck with learning Indonesian!

To clarify, I think that BradP was looking for a familiar Western book that has been translated into Bahasa Indonesia. He wants to read a book he is already familiar with, rather than something natively written in Indonesian. He is going to use his understanding of a well-known story in order to help him understand the Indonesian language (and presumably once he has learned the language to a degree, he will move on to its native literature!)

You could probably buy something online and have it shipped from Indonesia, if they accept foreign credit cards (not all online vendors do). For example, this seems to be a relatively well-stocked online bookstore: http://www.kutukutubuku.com/

erinja:http://www.kutukutubuku.com/

Nice find Erinja! And at the low sale price of about $2 USD, Alice in Wonderland (vs the high non-sale price of $3).

They have a good selection! Thanks Erinja.

Hello!

You can start learning Indonesian language from free learning resources or try to engage in an online Indonesian language course. But as a beginner, you can also start the learning Indonesian applications.