Thankfully Bahasa Indonesia does not have too many sounds that are not in the "sonic repertoire" of English and French. The sounds that prove to be most difficult to English speakers are the rolled "r" (e.g. "berjuan", "please", and "besar", "big/large") and the glottal stop (e.g. "tidak", "do not/is not", and "besok", "tomorrow"). I have experience rolling r's from my beginner knowledge of Spanish, but the glottal stop is a totally new sound for me, and thus is difficult to produce. This is a shared difficulty among western learners of Indonesian, and thus any progress beyond pronouncing a glottal stop past "tidack" is appreciated. When Indonesians pronounce a glottal stop it is very subtle, as if the sound tapers off in the last syllable and is just slightly cut off with the glottal stop. Thus it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which words require glottal stops and which do not. However, Thalia and Julie have kept their corrections of our pronunciations of words to a minimum at this point, focusing mostly on vocabulary and sparing corrections for only the most egregious of mistakes.
As a musician, I find that analyzing and picking up an accent is something that comes relatively naturally for me. However, another aspect of learning Indonesian, the intonation of sentences, is something that will take some time to feel natural. Indonesian is not a tonal language, so the majority of sentences is spoken "flat", with tonal jumps coming at the penultimate syllable of a sentence and falling on the ultimate syllable. Thankfully this is not a critical requirement of being understood while speaking Indonesian; as I continue my comprehension of spoken Indonesian, I plan to pay attention to the different ways in which people intone their voices.
Comments
It is really interesting learning the different intonations of different languages. For some reason, I did not expect Indonesian to have a mostly flat tone. I thought there would be significant variation in tone even in a single sentence, just from what I have heard from other Southeast Asian countries. This is so intriguing!