Everyday Balinese

This is a concise and user–friendly guide to the Balinese language

Everyday Balinese is targeted to anyone who wishes to learn to speak colloquial Balinese. There are 23 lessons in the book, each with a dialogue that centers around the Balinese daily life. These realistic beginner Balinese dialogues are a great way to learn Balinese as it is really spoken. The dialogue is presented twice: The first version representing the lumrah or common Balinese; the second the alus or refined Balinese. Both versions are exactly the same grammatically; the difference lies in the word choice. Lumrah or common words are used by participants of equal social status in a conversation, and it reflects intimacy and informality among the users. Alus or refined words are associated with distancing and formality among users in a conversation.

Each lesson contains a section on the grammar an word function, as well as a list of words in both the lumrah and alus forms, followed by their Indonesian and English equivalents. Each lesson ends with a section on sentence construction—how to use the structures taught to make simple sentences.

The book has a pronunciation guide at the front, and a section or greeting, ordinal numbers and a handy dictionary at the end. The dictionary is arranged alphabetically by Balinese, followed by their Indonesian and English equivalents.