Built for foreigners who actually want to speak.
No streaks-as-manipulation, no gamified guilt, no pay-to-win gems. Carefully chosen vocabulary, themed lessons, grammar chapters, real dialogues, and a spaced-repetition engine that shows you a word again just before you would have forgotten it.
Why Indonesian, and why this way
Bahasa Indonesia is one of the most learner-friendly languages on earth: phonetic spelling, no verb conjugation, no grammatical gender, no tones. What it does have is a rich affix system, a sharp formal/informal register, and cultural subtleties that textbooks gloss over.
Most apps either oversimplify Indonesian (making it feel babyish) or hand you a dictionary with no structure. Speak Indo takes the opposite approach: fewer words, better explanations, real stories, and teacher's notes that tell you when to use kami vs kita or why tidak and bukan are never interchangeable.
What's inside
- Curated vocabulary (A1 / A2 / B1), grouped by category with pronunciation, example sentence, and teacher's notes on the trickier ones.
- Themed lessons across three stages: Essentials → Daily Life → Travel. Each one has a cultural note written for foreigners specifically.
- Grammar chapters covering SVO, affixes (ber-, me-, di-, ter-, pe-, ke-an), classifiers, particles, reported speech, the yang particle, and more.
- Real dialogues (rice field visit, hotel booking, ojek ride, job interview, and more) with line-by-line audio playback.
- 7 games: Quick 10, Speed Round, Match Pairs, Type It and Build Sentences, plus Listen Up and Say It on Pro.
- Recorded audio for every word, 1,327 clips bundled with the app so pronunciation works offline. Say It scores what you said using the iPhone's own speech recognition, on the device.
The philosophy
Languages aren't memorized, they're absorbed. That means two things: regular, small exposures beat occasional marathons, and seeing the same word in varied contexts beats repetition in isolation. Speak Indo's SRS scheduler does the first; the stories, lessons, and example sentences do the second.
Sign in once and your words, streak and schedule follow your account rather than the device. The only things stored are what's needed to do that: email, display name, and the JSON of your learning state. We use privacy-conscious product analytics to understand what works, but no ads, no social pixels, and no selling data. Full details in Privacy.
Who built this
A solo project by someone who moved to Indonesia and got tired of apps that felt like slot machines. If you've got ideas, bugs, or you'd just like to say hi, the help page has a contact link.