A familiar alphabet, no verb conjugation, and plenty of borrowed words: why Malay is one of the friendliest Asian languages to start with.
Malay is the national language of Malaysia and Brunei, one of the four official languages of Singapore, and closely related to Indonesian. Together, Malay and Indonesian are understood by a very large number of people across Southeast Asia.
For English speakers, Malay has one big advantage over many Asian languages: it is written in the Latin alphabet, a form known as Rumi. Spelling is also largely phonetic, so once you know how the letters sound, you can read a new word aloud with reasonable confidence. There are no tones, either, which removes one of the main hurdles of languages such as Mandarin or Vietnamese.
Malay verbs don't change for person or tense. Makan ("to eat") and minum ("to drink") stay exactly the same whether you mean "I eat", "she ate" or "they will drink". Time is shown with separate words instead:
Often, context or a time word such as "yesterday" or "tomorrow" is enough, and no marker is needed at all.
Malay nouns also have no grammatical gender, so there is no equivalent of French le and la. Even the everyday pronoun dia covers both "he" and "she". Plurals are often left unmarked when the meaning is clear, or formed by repeating the word: buku is "book", and buku-buku means "books".
Malay is not effortless. Its main complexity lies in affixes: prefixes, suffixes and combinations of both that build new words from a root. The prefix pe-, for example, can turn an action into the person who does it, and the me- family of prefixes appears on many verbs in formal writing.
The good news is that you can get a long way with root words alone in everyday conversation. Affixes can come later, once you have a solid base of vocabulary to attach them to.
Centuries of trade left Malay with words from Sanskrit, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese languages and English. Many of the English ones are easy to spot once you know Malay spelling rules. From Flashlingo's beginner deck:
Malaysian Malay and Indonesian share most of their grammar and core vocabulary, and speakers of one can generally understand the other. There are differences in spelling, pronunciation and some everyday words, though. In Malaysia, kereta means "car", while Indonesians usually say mobil. Some words even differ in meaning: Malaysian percuma means "free of charge", while in Indonesian the same word means "in vain".
Flashlingo's deck follows Malaysian usage. If Indonesian is your goal, most of what you learn still carries over, but it's worth checking a handful of everyday words.
Start with the Malay quiz. The Beginner level covers 500 everyday words, and the full word list is on the page, grouped by topic.