Spanish and Indonesian -- similarities

Discussion Open Forum
1

I’ve learned a bit of both Spanish and Indonesian, and have been struck by how similar they are, in grammar, phenomes, sentence structure, and virtually everything but word roots. This is very striking seeing as how they come from two different language families. Perhaps the bigget similarity between them is they have both been spread primarily as trade languages, to bridge the gap between disparate peoples over large areas, and have therefore needed to be simple to say and learn.

Has any fluent speaker of Spanish also encountered Indonesian, or the other way around? If so, do you find that knowing one helped you learn the other more easily than, say, someone who previously knew neither?

2

I’m a speaker of Indonesian, but I don’t find it similar in anyway with Spanish in term of grammar nor structure nor phonemes.
Sure, Indonesian is a melting pot of many other languages. It borrowed script from Pallava, Arabic, and later Dutch. It imported a huge number of words from Sankrit, arabic, portuguese, spanish, dutch, japanese, and not to mention from its own many local dialects.

ax