Comments
By decimalenough 2025-11-2519:1819 reply I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok.
Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the language barrier. Hotels are incredible value, you can get top tier branded five stars for $100. Shopping for locally produced clothes etc is stupidly cheap. Indonesian food is amazing, there's so much more to it than nasi goreng, and you can find great Japanese, Italian, etc too; these are comparatively expensive but lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10. The nightlife scene is wild, although you need to make local friends to really get into it. And it's reasonably safe, violent crime is basically unknown and I never had problems with pickpockets (although they do exist) or scammers.
I think Jakarta's biggest problems are lack of marketing and top tier obvious attractions. Bangkok has royal palaces and temples galore plus a wild reputation for go-go bars etc, Jakarta does not, so nobody even considers it as a vacation destination.
I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time.
The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
By asmosoinio 2025-11-2521:554 reply > ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know.
Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears...
I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-2523:388 reply In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame.
Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
Well imagine somebody was talking about "bass" the fish, in a context of "bass" the instrument. If they pronounced it like the fish, certainly for a moment your language processing would stop, figure it out, fill in the gap, and continue.
Every time the wrong pitch accent is used, a similar process takes place. Especially in highly complex conversations, where a lot of processing power is going towards the semantics itself, and hopefully the person shouldn't have to worry about figuring out which word the other person is saying.
It's unclear if you yourself have native-level (or close to) pitch accent yourself. But if you don't, how can you know whether it's actually important or not?
Just remember, you can tune an instrument, but you can’t tuna fish.
By saltcured 2025-11-2620:32 Eh, in a discussion about homophones, homonyms, and ambiguity, I prefer the variant, "you can tune a bass, but you can tuna fish".
Right up there with "fruit flies like a banana, but time flies like an arrow".
By dredmorbius 2025-11-2615:05 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can_Tune_a_Piano,_but_You_...> (originally by Groucho Marx: <https://ultimateclassicrock.com/kevin-cronin-reo-speedwagon-...>).
Or perhaps more HN-appropriate: <https://unixhistory.livejournal.com/1808.html>.
>How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar
It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
Since the war, we have a lot of Ukrainians at our Flemish school. We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-265:10
This is nice to hear. A real win.> We just make it work, no time for gatekeeping.Real question (because it took me, sadly, too long to learn it as an adult): Why don't they gatekeep? Do you think there is compassion for those who fled war in Ukraine, so people are more forgiving about linguistic and cultural differences?
By jack_tripper 2025-11-269:321 reply You're comparing apples to oranges. Kids learn foreign languages much faster than adults, plus get a lot more support and less judgement on mistakes from adults since school kids don't operate in a highly competitive environment.
But good luck reaching proficient fluency in a foreign language in your 30s where you'll face a lot more gatekeeping especially on the jobs market. Many western nations still gate-keep careers and opportunities based on regional accents alone, let alone not being a native speaker.
And before I get assaulted in the comments with the "umm acksually I could do it just fine it never was a problem for me exceptions, YES I know it's possible, it's just much much harder, especially when you've got a full time job and adult responsibilities, compared to doing it when you're 5-15 on the school playground, playing videogames with mates or watching cartoons.
By michaelscott 2025-11-2611:041 reply You're conflating 2 issues here: judgement of adult attempts at a new language and the time required to learn it. The first is just a cultural thing, although it is sometimes valid for understanding a speaker (cases in Slavic languages, pronunciation in a homonym-heavy language like French, tones in Asian languages). Problem is that it's oftentimes more "cultural" than "valid" critique, which helps no one.
The second problem is more practical and it's not the only difference between child and adult speakers; the vocabulary required in most day-to-day settings for a child is considerably easier to master than the adult equivalent, regardless of language (describing symptoms to your doctor or getting through a bank or tax appointment will be much more difficult than describing the weather or what you want for lunch). Adults in general are just as good as children at learning new languages, it's just that life has different requirements from that age group.
Edit: that said, I actually am agreeing with your general sentiment
By jack_tripper 2025-11-2611:161 reply Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Because statements like the original I was replying to of "no time for gatekeeping" are simply not true, but more like the poster doesn't notice it because he (or his kids) are not affected by that gatekeeping.
By erincandescent 2025-11-2613:171 reply > Sure some few adults can learn languages as fast as kids, but you completely missed my main points around gatekeeping that language skills always has on adults and less so on kids.
Adults in general are actually way faster at learning languages than kids if you control for time actually spent learning the language, but generally adults are required to fit language learning in around a full time job (and are also full of shame/embarrassment)
By jack_tripper 2025-11-2613:321 reply Can't concur. As a kid I learned foreign languages effortlessly, compared to now as an expat. And every other expat here my age shares the same experiences, where their 8 year old already speak the host country's language better than they do.
By somenameforme 2025-11-2617:54 As another expat, I'd concur with him, with an asterisk. The thing is - your kids are surrounded by the language nonstop. Depending on your situation it may be spoken at school, certainly spoken by some of their friends, teachers, and so on endlessly. But "you" (speaking in generalities of expats and not necessarily literally you)? Unless you happen to have a local wife, then you probably speak it extremely rarely, there's a reasonable chance you can't even read it if it's non-latin, and there's no real need to move beyond that.
Living in one country for a rather long time, my fluency was basically non-existent beyond simple greetings, shopping/eating, and other basic necessities. By contrast somewhat recently I've taken a major interest in another language, one that's generally considered extremely difficult, and I've reached at least basic fluency in about 3 years. The difference? I immersed myself in the other language, my music playlist is overwhelmingly in that language, I've watched endless series and movies in that language, I've made efforts to read books in the other language, and any time I find another speaker I make sure to use the opportunity to talk with him in that language, and so on. If I was in a country where it was the native language, then I'd probably be near fluent by now.
By omaewabaka 2025-11-2616:19 As a Japanese, I will mention that I've seen Japanese people correct each other on this, both in private and in public. Its because we might get the meaning by context, but if you pronounce it wrong, it sounds very strange in that context where its clearly wrong... To default to an assumption that this is due to racism / cultural gatekeeping says a whole lot about your world view and perception about Japanese people and culture than it does my people.
For example, examine your own words when you say that where you come from its a subtle form of discrimination. Well, you are saying it yourself that an action is deemed discriminatory according to the standards of your own culture, not to the standards of the other culture. You realize that could be cultural misunderstanding? There is a word for evaluating another culture by the standards of one's own culture: ethnocentrism.
If you are actually living in Japan, you should self-reflect a bit about what problems you face that you attribute subconsciously in your head to malicious intent, rather than cultural misunderstanding.
Anyways, I'm often disappointed by the comment section on this website when its anything about Japanese people. This is just another reminder for me to avoid the comments.
By danielscrubs 2025-11-2611:05 I correct my kids when they do mistakes, how else would they improve?
Calling people racist when they try to be helpful might say more about you than them.
I mean what I say and say what I mean is also something worth striving for.
By bamboozled 2025-11-268:41 Strong agree
By bugglebeetle 2025-11-264:171 reply Japanese actually has a much smaller set of phonemes (~half as many as English), resulting in extensive homophones. When combined with its greater tendency toward ambiguity, correct use of pitch can actually have a larger impact on intelligibility, as compared to many other languages.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-265:233 reply I swear there must an LLM that posts these types of replies. No matter what anyone says about Japan language or culture, someone will pop into the conversation with "acckkkshually...".
I can tell you from (thousands of) first hand experiences watching non-naive speakers of Japanese for many years: It doesn't matter nearly as much as locals want you to think it matters. Sure, the homophone thing is real, but Japanese people adapt their style of speaking depending upon the audience. (Japanese language and culture is highly context sensitive.) I hear it often when people pick and choose their words carefully in an attempt to reduce confusion around homophones. As a non-native speaker, when I am trying to use a relatively rare term that the speaker doesn't expect me to know, I slow down, use my hands a bit, and toss out some synonyms or brief explanation of the term I am trying to say. On the whole, Japanese people are excellent listeners, so it works pretty well.
What matters more: Japan has very little linguistic diversity for the size of its nation. Plus, it is an island. My theory (empirically observed): This makes them less able to adapt to non-native speakers. When you try to speak a type of Chinese (there are so many) to a native speaker from mainland China... their brain is automatically wired to heavy accents and different word choices, because their country is so linguistically diverse. As a result, when learning a Chinese language, it is pretty easy to speak with locals. In Japan: It is way harder. Mainland Chinese people really make an effort to understand you. It's no different than a tourist from a different region speaking to locals with a heavy accent ... or a different type of Chinese.
By CorrectHorseBat 2025-11-269:392 reply Nice theory, but my experience is exactly the other way around.
Even after several years of learning Chinese I still had trouble communicating with Chinese people, especially those who had no experience talking to foreigners. When I arrived in China and asked the way to the university I was going to (which was close by and very famous) they just didn't get what I was saying. In the end I had to show them the written word.
I don't speak Japanese, but when I arrived and said the name of the city and they immediately understood where I wanted to go. After my experience with Chinese I was flabbergasted that that went so smooth.
I blame the tones in Chinese (which I admit I'm not very good at)
By seanmcdirmid 2025-11-2616:38 You might have been trying too hard with tones and the stilted speech didn’t help with understanding. My first trip to China before I spoke Chinese well enough…the Beijing taxi drivers, you needed to speak more naturally for them to get you, not more correctly. You were better off talking like a farmer than trying to talk like a broadcaster.
By adrian_b 2025-11-2611:23 I think that you are right that your problem must have been caused more by the Chinese tones than by any other characteristic of Chinese, and perhaps also from some of their consonants that do not have a straightforward English equivalent.
On the other hand, the Japanese pronunciation is one of the easiest in the world to learn, even taking into account the subtleties of pitch.
By gosub100 2025-11-267:20 People are allowed to disagree with you. Your caricature of them doesn't add to the conversation.
By bugglebeetle 2025-11-265:47 I speak Japanese and am fully aware of the dynamic you describe, having experienced it many times, first hand. I’ve also been truly misunderstood as a result of the wrong use of accent, difference in dialect, etc.
This all being said, after this interaction, I imagine you would have trouble in any country, with any language, because you seem quite insufferable and boorish.
By wahnfrieden 2025-11-264:17 Says it’s overrated and non semantic… on authority of what? Being foreign to it and not knowing the language, naturally
By spacechild1 2025-11-2523:381 reply Japanese pitch accent actually varies across regions. Some have no pitch accent at all! I think this shows that it's not very important unless you want to sound like a native speaker. I never bothered to learn the "standard" pitch accents but I tend to imitate the Kansai pitch accent of my wife :)
By wahnfrieden 2025-11-264:241 reply Kagoshima where there is no pitch accent is like a different language entirely though, and nearly unintelligible
By numpad0 2025-11-265:54 Native Kyushu conversations are literally unintelligible to me as a Japanese speaker. There are actually numerous Japanese dialects and accents that aren't so mutually intelligible, though of course post-TV generations understand TV Japanese.
That's kind of a secret to how CJK languages are each supposedly being a unique linguistic isolates: the rest of the families are hiding in the "dialects".
By Squealer2642 2025-11-2522:27 Both are Austronesian languages
By csomar 2025-11-268:39 Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines share a lot (language, food, genetics and customs). Look up Austronesian people. They do exist as minorities in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. After a while (4 years so far in SEA), you get to notice them in these countries among the masses.
They are both Austronesian languages (also related to the Polynesian languages), so the similarity is not due to coincidence. In SEA there are also other completely unrelated language families besides Austronesian, e.g. the Thai language and the Khmer language belong to different language families with no relationships to Austronesian languages, like Malaysian (besides recent linguistic borrowings between neighbors).
All Austronesian languages are simple phonetically. Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
> Also the phonetic simplicity of Japanese is likely to have been caused by an Austronesian substrate related to that of the aborigine Taiwanese people.
That's being asserted with too much confidence, I think. While I was aware some kind of Austronesian connection has been suggested, as far as I know there's zero actual consensus among linguists on any kind of relationship between Japanese and any other language family. Like, there's theories relating Japanese to everything from Korean to Turkish to Greek floating around - but nothing to my knowledge that we should really be describing as "likely" at the point, even a connection with the grammatically extremely similar Korean.
Now that said, I don't know a lot about the Austronesian languages or this particular hypothesis. I did find an article about a possible Austronesian substratum ("Does Japanese have an Austronesian stratum?" by Ann Kumar), but it seemed mostly preoccupied with drawing that connection through similarities in vocabulary rather than phonology. Do you have pointers to scholarly sources on the subject?
By adrian_b 2025-11-2614:16 Japanese is likely to have been a hybrid language, somewhat similar with many European languages that had both a substrate and a superstrate, e.g. a Romance language like French had a Celtic substrate and a Germanic superstrate.
However, in the case of such European languages the 3 combined languages were not radically different, but they belonged to the same great language family, only to different branches. For Japanese, its sources have come from completely unrelated language families, which is the probable cause of the difficulties in determining the affinities of Japanese.
The grammar of Japanese is very similar to its Western neighbor, i.e. Korean, while its phonology is very similar to its Southern neighbor, i.e. the Austronesian languages of Ancient Taiwan and Philippines.
On the other hand, for the vocabulary of native Japanese, before it incorporated the huge amount of borrowings from Chinese, it has been more difficult to find relationships with other languages. Besides the Southern and Western influences, Japanese was also affected by a Northern influence, from people related to Ainu. As there are no old enough recorded sources about languages related to Ainu, it is possible that many of the words that do not appear to have a Southern or Western source may have come from a Northern contribution to the Japanese language.
I did not find any linguistic publication that does an adequate analysis of the relationships of Japanese with other languages. To be fair, such an analysis would require a huge amount of work, because unlike for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages, where a large amount of texts have been preserved from several millennia ago, when the evolution of the languages had not changed most words so much as to make their correspondences in related languages unrecognizable, for Japanese many of the languages related to those which have contributed to the formation of Japanese have probably disappeared before leaving any written records. A credible analysis of the possible relationships of Japanese would require the compilation of a great amount of information about poorly documented languages, in order to try to reconstruct their earlier stages, where similarities with Old Japanese could be identified.
Korean has old written records, but only about as old as Japanese itself, so those are not very helpful to reconstruct the stage from many centuries before, which could have provided a component of Japanese. A language related to Korean appears to have contributed to Japanese, but only as a late superstrate that has applied a new grammar on the vocabulary inherited from the previous inhabitants of the islands. The language providing this superstrate was probably the language of the Yayoi people, who immigrated in Japan more than two thousand years ago.
For the Southern and Northern languages that could have contributed to the vocabulary and phonology of the language of Japan before the Yayoi immigration, there are extremely low chances of becoming able to reconstruct them as they were a few millennia ago, so it is unlikely that the origin of Japanese will ever be known with certainty.
Still, the fact that the languages that share features with Japanese are exactly its former neighbors in the 3 directions besides the Ocean (from before Taiwan became Chinese), is not surprising at all, but it is exactly what would be expected. What are not known are the details of what exactly each source has contributed and when did this happen.
By ipince 2025-11-2618:50 > which I can't say about any other SEA language
maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.
I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.
I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
By RankingMember 2025-11-2615:42 It'd be nice if there was some way to "acclimate" your gut prior to a trip like that.
Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
By faizmokh 2025-11-266:08 Jawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays.
Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
By dboreham 2025-11-2614:57 Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
By realusername 2025-11-267:061 reply > How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-11-2616:411 reply There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
By realusername 2025-11-2620:181 reply That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-11-2621:47 Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
By wisty 2025-11-262:27 Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
By alephnerd 2025-11-2522:42
> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization
Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese.
The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage.
A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
By xvedejas 2025-11-2523:56 Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-2523:401 reply One word: Colonization
Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
> Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization
Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?
By csomar 2025-11-2611:57 No. But Arabs didn't colonize the Malay islands. They just adopted Islam from their internal politics. Not sure why this triggered you, pretty much everybody is a colonizer.
Do you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs?
There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
By hearsathought 2025-11-2617:29 > There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate.
Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
By hearsathought 2025-11-2616:58 The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.
By csomar 2025-11-268:44 The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
By celloductor 2025-11-261:03 most SEA languages are similar btw
I spent a month in Jakarta earlier this year and wasn't impressed.
Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
Jakarta has a noise problem. The temples blasting the prayers is disruptive to sleep and inner peace. The traffic does not make anything either.
Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
By cholantesh 2025-11-261:16 >Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
I won't speak for the quality but this seems like an extremely dubious statement. Malay cuisine is certainly diverse, owing to settled migrant populations from other parts of Asia, but they don't have the dizzying array of indigenous cuisines on offer in Indonesia, many of which aren't readily available in Java.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture. MY has wayyy better food (both in quality and diversity).
Agreed! Malaysia is really underrated, or at least it was by me. Now it's one of my favorite spots in the world, food is great (not as Thai's but comes close), wonderful sea, wonderful jungle, Kuala Lumpur is becoming a really nice city and CoL is value for money.
By itake 2025-11-2521:13 The teh tarik tea (served in a glass mug! paper cups don't count) is my favorite drink right now.
Also Malaysian Indian food is one of my favorite foods (especially the sweet roti).
By itake 2025-11-260:57 True. I forgot about Filipino food. Filipino bbq pig was good tho
By kabes 2025-11-265:55 Made me remember again how disappointed I was (food-wise) that time I went backpacking in the Philippines after backpacking in Thailand. Most days we had to choose between dry rice with tasteless fried chicken, or tasteless fried chicken with dry rice.
By CuriouslyC 2025-11-260:292 reply I'll see anything you get in Indonesia, and raise you Balut... Or Betamax... or Helmet. Their national dish was designed to hide the aroma of rotten meat, FFS.
By phainopepla2 2025-11-2521:115 reply > Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture
I take it you haven't been to Burma / Myanmar
By CitrusFruits 2025-11-2521:461 reply Having been to both Indonesia and Myanmar, I can say confidently Burmese food is much better. The one exception is the dessert Martabak you can get in Java is to die for.
By petesergeant 2025-11-260:49 Lived in SE Asia for well over 15 years, and Burmese food is great.
By seattle_spring 2025-11-2521:264 reply ???
Burmese food is absolutely delicious. Burma Love in SF, Rangoon Bistro or Burma Joy in Portland. They're some of my favorite restaurants.
By phainopepla2 2025-11-2521:311 reply Burmese food in the US is very different from the food you encounter in the country itself.
By izolate 2025-11-2522:23 Not only is Burmese food in Myanmar far better, but even the small, modest restaurants bring out a whole spread of complimentary small dishes (pickles, salads, crunchy snacks, all kinds of delicious little sides) before the main meal. It's just built into the dining culture there, and it's incredibly generous compared to what you see abroad.
By socalgal2 2025-11-2619:59 Those restaurants had none of the food I ate in Burma
By fuzzythinker 2025-11-266:00 Not sure if it's still there, but Burma Super Star is the one I go to and it's good.
By EB-Barrington 2025-11-2521:34 Nice. I'm an ex-tour guide, and had many jovial discussions with a colleague who toured Myanmar and LOVED the food - he knew I thought it was pretty average, at best.
Of course, that crazy guy didn't really like Thai food...
By itake 2025-11-2521:12 haha, I have not.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-2523:444 reply
I offer a practical template: <Large city in developing country X> has a noise problem.> Jakarta has a noise problem.When you say "temples", do you mean masjid (mosque)? It is pretty normal anywhere in the Islamic-majority world to sing prayers over a loud speaker a few times a day.
By socalgal2 2025-11-2620:02 Catholic churches ring bells twice a day. It's less then mosques that do their call 5 times a day both as non-religious person both are disappointing to me.
By satvikpendem 2025-11-260:46 This is an appeal to normality fallacy, just because something is normal doesn't mean it's good, or in this case that it doesn't disrupt sleep.
U.S. cities have noise laws.
I don’t think Tokyo is considered loud.
Yes, temples blasting prayers.
By throwaway2037 2025-11-265:07 Neither the US, nor Japan are considered developing countries. I'm confused by your comment.
I can tell you that Tokyo is very loud. Constant road traffic noise everywhere, drunk people singing on the streets, pointless warnings from the local municipal office on the public alert system, noisy street advertisements, constant announcements in train stations, bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night, flight traffic noise, railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging, etc
By socalgal2 2025-11-2620:04 Tokyo isn't loud at all. Go 2-3 blocks from any major street and they are practically silent.
> drunk people singing on the streets
never seen this
> bousouzoku gangs constantly revving their bikes in silent neighborhoods every night
seen this maybe twice in 25 years
> flight traffic noise
do you live next to the airport? this is not a thing relatively to any other major city I've lived in
> railroad noise of the trains passing, level crossing barriers constantly ding-donging
This is only a thing if you live next to a track which is like 1% of housing
noisy street advertisements.. and jingles... shops of all shapes and sizes blaring music...
By pezezin 2025-11-266:55 I live in Japan and this is something that I will never get used to. Yes, the people are quiet, but shops are ridiculously loud. Go to any supermarket and there are seven different jingles playing in parallel! Honestly, I don't understand how the employees don't go crazy.
By panick21_ 2025-11-269:50 Cars and mopets have a noise problem not cities.
But I guess the mosque doesn't help.
By rd07 2025-11-263:55 A little tip for your next visit to Jakarta :
- Indonesia is a tropical country, and Jakarta is in the vicinity of the sea, so depending on the month of year, it can rain anytime on the day. So, if you are not comfortable with rain, always use a taxi/grab/gocar to go around.
- If you are pressed for time, I suggest you use airport train to go to the airport. At least you won't get stuck on traffic.
- About the noise problem, I think it won't be a problem if you sleep in a tall building. The last time I go there, I sleep in a relatively good hotel and deliberately choose the higher floor. And the noise doesn't become a problem for me.
Hope this help and you can get a nicer experience on your next visit
By csomar 2025-11-268:48 > Traffic was terrible. I almost missed my flight due to taking a bike over a car, but then it started pouring rain and I had to huddle under a bridge while I waited for a car.
I guess people perceive this very differently. One sees it as an adventure while another one sees it as a hustle. Jakarta is a hustle. Some people like it and make them feel alive. If you don't enjoy it, it'll make you miserable.
> Also, Indonesian food IMHO is at the bottom of SEA food culture.
I agree. I hate the food but Malay food is similar. What Malaysia has is two other major races (Chinese and Indians) and a strong expat community (ie: Thai, Viet and Japanese) that bring lots of food diversity.
By nrhrjrjrjtntbt 2025-11-2521:393 reply Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA
By askvictor 2025-11-265:16 Bangkok doesn't have nearly the noise issues of Jakarta; the traffic proceeds without every vehicle beeping most of the time in Bangkok. Also no prayer calls.
Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.
By Nition 2025-11-262:05 I presume they mean South East Asia.
By CamperBob2 2025-11-2522:051 reply The regional abbreviation, or the airport code?
.... what? Either works?
By mandolingual 2025-11-2523:181 reply Seattle's not really known for noise. The opposite, if anything. Rain (caveat it's not the rain it's the dark and it's mostly mizzle blah blah blah) and traffic though, sure.
By aurareturn 2025-11-267:08 Jakarta doesn’t need to turn itself into a sex tourism city like Bangkok. It shouldn’t. Thailand sold its people out to make some business and government people rich in my opinion.
I spent a lot of time in Jakarta. It has some serious issues like pollution, worst traffic in SEA, unwalkable city, actually far more expensive for what you get than other SEA areas. It isn’t surprising to me that people don’t want to travel there for holiday. There are far better places for tourism.
By itake 2025-11-2521:15 and air
This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with.
Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart
I traveled often between Jakarta and Japan in 2018, 2019 and 2020. The real breath of fresh air for me was literally the fresh air back in Japan. After running around for a week through Jakarta, I would inevitably develop a deep cough and a clogged nose. That said, the people, the food, and as someone else pointed out the nightlife is amazing.
By Yokolos 2025-11-2610:13 Somebody I know had asthma while she lived in Jakarta. It went away when she moved to Europe. I really liked Jakarta, but the air quality is one of the reasons why I won't go back again.
Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map....
So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries.
I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if you zoomed in, due to old lead piping and so on.
Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?
Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?
By abdullahkhalids 2025-11-2617:00 The price of clean water is at least an order of magnitude less than the price of electricity, but the cost of creating a water grid is probably more expensive than the electricity grid.
You will notice that many of the countries with unsafe tap water also have electricity reliability problems. If the economics of electricity don't work, then the economics of safe water don't work at all.
It's expensive to control the quality of water from source all the way to tap. Just having visible clean running water is hard.
By wiradikusuma 2025-11-264:131 reply Bottled (mineral) water is a big business in Indonesia. Not sure if "people" are incentivized to change that anytime soon.
By esperent 2025-11-266:05 I don't think there's any conspiracy like this. It's just economic + (lack of) beauracracy. Installing and maintaining a functioning potable water supply across an entire country is expensive, but even harder is setting and maintaining standards.
By jasonthorsness 2025-11-2520:022 reply What is the air quality like to actually breathe in your experience? I have noticed Jakarta on lists of poor AQI and it doesn't look great [1] but I think the AQI number is kind of an abstraction.
[1] https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta/hi...
By ubercow13 2025-11-260:54 I found it probably the worst of anywhere I've ever been, you can taste it and just being outside slightly burns the back of your throat. I still really like visiting though.
Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie. It's even worse when you're sitting on the back of a motorbike 6ft away from 10 other gas powered bikes.
There is slow adoption of electric vehicles, but still very low adoption rate (like less than 10% of motorbikes).
By apelapan 2025-11-2616:57 I don't feel that AQI in reasonably normal ranges corresponds at all to the subjective experience of how nice the air feels to breathe.
The best breathing I've done was in Mumbai. Felt like a silk blanket both in the lungs and on the skin. I'm sure it would be bad for me if I stayed there a few decades, but it didnt feel bad at all when visiting.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-2523:471 reply > Air quality is terrible. AQI does not lie.
Heh. To get a sense of what the page's numbers might mean, I checked on Kaohsiung, where you can taste gasoline in the air as you walk down the street.
And hey, reported air quality in Kaohsiung is abysmal, so that checks out. Jakarta even looks good by comparison.
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/taiwan/kaohsiung/kaohsiung
https://www.aqi.in/us/dashboard/indonesia/jakarta/jakarta
AQI appears to have Jakarta pegged at an average "66", which looks pretty respectable for the region. They seem to have much more carbon monoxide than Kaohsiung or Shanghai, but much less fine particulate.
By mcmoor 2025-11-261:47 Hmm it's a bit surprising. Usually when I checked, it'll never be under 100. Maybe the current rainy season helps?
Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.
I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.
> not too polluted
Are we talking about the same Bangkok? I'm talking about the Bangkok in Thailand where they literally shut down the schools due to air pollution being so bad [0].
What Bangkok are you referring to?
Malaysia is wayyy cleaner than Indonesia, both in air quality and trash on the ground.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/24/bangkok-pollut...
By projectazorian 2025-11-2522:211 reply Bangkok has seasonal haze incidents that can get bad enough to close schools etc. Those are a scourge across all of SEA and are generally caused by slash-and-burn agriculture practices. It's much different from having bad AQI year-round.
I'd hardly say Bangkok is a clean air capital, but it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
By decimalenough 2025-11-262:27 > it's next to the ocean with no significant mountains nearby so usually pollution gets blown out to sea.
So is Jakarta, and it's still pretty polluted.
By decimalenough 2025-11-262:401 reply For me Manila is the uncontested worst city in SEA. All of Jakarta's downsides, plus an absolutely horrific airport, worse traffic, extremely limited public transport network (which doesn't extend at all to the places where most business travellers go, namely Makati/BGC), higher crime and more violent crime too (lots of guns around), and worse food.
About the only upside is that most people speak some English, which is manifestly not the case in Jakarta.
By jeromegv 2025-11-2621:47 I guess we just have different experience of Manila. In most places you would go as a visitor, either tourist or business, you're not really likely to see a lot of violence. I've been there 10 times over 10 years, and really nothing truly bad happened or even seen or heard by fellow travellers. I've been harassed by street kids, that's about it.
Do people talk that crime exists? For sure. You have to be smart, just like any other big city. But I don't see how you'd truly put yourself into a dangerous situation. There's lots of security everywhere westerners might hang out.
Airport has seen lots of improvements recently.
But yes, traffic is horrendous, public transit as well.
By darrenf 2025-11-2521:56 > I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.
Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.
By thedrexster 2025-11-2523:251 reply This is such an odd position to create a burner account to argue...
By medstrom 2025-11-2615:24 If it seems odd, maybe it's not what they're doing.
By darkwater 2025-11-2521:05 N=1 but my experience with Philippines and Malaysia is exactly the opposite.
Vietnam.
source: I've been to almost every country in SEA at least 3x. (Brunei was once, never went to Timor-Leste).
Check the forex changes and rent prices if you don't believe me.
Harder to factor in is visa costs. Vietnam, you need to leave every 90 days. So you need to buy a $25usd visa + flights/buses + hotels for 3-5 days while you get your next visa. Thailand, you only need to leave every 6mo on the DTV.
Thailand is cracking down on visa runs and people staying quasi-permanently on short-stay visas: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visit/thailand-step...
The parent mentions the DTV visa which is the opposite of the visa-run strategy. Realistically though, if you're a "nomad" from a country with a powerful-ish passport you can come to Thailand for 60 days, extend once for 30 days for a total stay of 90 days. After that you can do a bit of a loop between Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines in whatever order you prefer and come back to Thailand in a year. They'll have no problem letting you in again.
It's pretty easy to spend a year in SEA without raising eyebrows at any border if you're willing to change countries somewhat often and don't mind AirAsia flights.
By itake 2025-11-2618:00 That is basically my life. I've visited almost every country in the region this year (+ China and Japan) on a tourist visa.
The problem for me personally is this life is stressful on relationships, health, and personal productivity. Spending a weekend every 1-2 months to deal with travel (and arrangements) is exhausting and expensive on productivity hours.
By ignoramous 2025-11-2521:031 reply > very filthy like New Delhi
Think you mean Delhi NCR? New Delhi is pretty small, and mostly houses political and social elite.
By bandrami 2025-11-260:21 I love that they put all the diplomats in Chanakyapur which would be like Italy putting them on Machiavelli Lane
I'd take Bangkok over Singapore any time of the day/month/year. There's still a bit of chaos in Bangkok in 2025 but once you spend a few days there and learn how to avoid peak traffic hours and areas it's incredibly charming and charistmatic city with loads of activities and opportunities for all classes of people. Singapore while clean is incredibly dull and characterless unless you're a billionaire.
By delta_p_delta_x 2025-11-2614:381 reply This comment is proof that the parent commenter has never actually lived in either city.
After a while, a city's 'character', 'charm', and 'charisma' all become annoyances. People live, work, go to school, file taxes, use transport, not just visit tourist attractions. Singapore's quality and efficiency of administration is light-years beyond any other country, perhaps bar Switzerland. 6.1 million people live in Singapore; they're not all multimillionaires.
By zarzavat 2025-11-2620:49 It's hard to put into words how unsafe Singapore makes me feel.
No, literally, it's hard to put it into words. I feel that if I criticize the country, the govt might take revenge the next time I visit. (See also: Bald JD Vance)
Metrics aren't everything. Singapore might be on paper a great place to live, but it could never be a home.
By kafkaesque 2025-11-2613:48 "Learn how to avoid peak traffic hours." Most people living in Bangkok cannot do this. Also, a very high percent of the time, the Icon Siam area is extremely congested (even on weekends). Yes, you can avoid living in or going to that area, but there are also very few nice areas in Bangkok in general.
Most don't have the luxury of the flexibility to avoid certain areas and/or certain peak travel times (which in BKK are many throughout the day)
By mandeepj 2025-11-2522:48 > you need to make local friends to really get into it
Well, that might sound like an impossible task!! So, just sign up for Experiences from any of the leading travel portals. They’d get you into any of the local party scenes.
By markus_zhang 2025-11-2520:051 reply Thanks for sharing. I’m wondering whether they have a large retro computing market?
By veeti 2025-11-2610:17 I'll just chime in that Chinatown in Glodok might have been that place a couple decades ago, but seemed quite deserted now :/ There's still some shops around though.
By stickfigure 2025-11-262:412 reply > lunch at the Italian place in the Ritz-Carlton was under $10
I'm curious, what does a beer or a glass of wine cost?
By rossriley 2025-11-265:16 A local beer in a bar will normally be around 60k IDR so $3-4, wine is more expensive generally in SEA you'll normally pay around 90-100k IDR per glass.
By wiradikusuma 2025-11-264:10 Alcohol is more expensive than other countries, in general.
By rurban 2025-11-2614:26 What? Jakarta's biggest problem is the rising sea level and the sinking ground. Jakarta is one of the fastest sinking cities globally. Venice or Miami are nothing compared to this. 40% will be gone soon.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7a9fa31104334f3db4c01d0...
By andyjohnson0 2025-11-2522:022 reply Thanks for posting this. Really interesting perspectives
Whats the food like for vegetarians/ vegans?
By decimalenough 2025-11-262:25 If you're strict or allergic, very difficult. Fish sauces and pastes like terasi and patis are culinary staples on the level of soy sauce and make it into otherwise seemingly vegetarian dishes.
If you're willing to flex a bit and just avoid obvious meat/fish, you'll survive, there's plenty of tofu, tempeh, veg etc. Gado-gado is always veg, nasi/mee goreng, etc.
By zppln 2025-11-2522:09 Tempeh is an Indonesian staple and from what I understand pretty popular with vegans.
By decimalenough 2025-11-2610:01 Because they're both hot, polluted, congested and mostly poor, but Bangkok is literally the world's most popular tourist destination city while Jakarta is not.
By peyton 2025-11-262:50 The nightlife is wildest in SEA but definitely for the bold and brave.
By kgwxd 2025-11-2523:25 Is being an attractive vacation destination necessarily a good thing for a city? They're the biggest city, didn't they "win"?
Sounds wonderful if you're OK with Indonesia's ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of West Papua.
> Widespread atrocities committed by Indonesian forces have led human rights groups to describe the situation as a genocide against the indigenous Papuan population. Reports of mass killings, forced displacement, and sexual violence are extensive and credible. According to a 2007 estimate by scholar De R. G. Crocombe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Papuans have been killed since Indonesia's occupation began.[19][23] A 2004 report by Yale Law School argued that the scale and intent of Indonesia’s actions fall within the legal definition of genocide.[24] State violence has targeted women in particular. A 2013 and 2017 study by AJAR and the Papuan Women's Working Group found that 4 in 10 Papuan women reported suffering state abuse,[25] while a 2019 follow-up found similar results.[26][27][Note 1][Note 2]
> In 2022, the UN condemned what it described as "shocking abuses" committed by the Indonesian state, including the killing of children, disappearances, torture, and large-scale forced displacement. It called for "urgent and unrestricted humanitarian aid to the region."[28] Human Rights Watch (HRW) has noted that the Papuan region functions as a de facto police state, where peaceful political expression and independence advocacy are met with imprisonment and violence.[29] While some analysts argue that the conflict is aggravated by a lack of state presence in remote areas,[30] the overwhelming trend points to systemic state violence and neglect.
> Indonesia continues to block foreign access to the Papuan region, citing so-called "safety and security concerns", though critics argue this is to suppress international scrutiny of its genocidal practices
By sl-1 2025-11-268:14 They also have not prosecuted the earlier genocides they made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
I have personally flagged them as a country non-grata.
By defrost 2025-11-268:29
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrciT3lXtwEBLACKWATER Angwi fled his mountain home, the soldiers, as they burnt his village down, near the border line. He’s left the card games by the valley fire, the stories that his uncle told, the stories old, the spirits past. He’s seen the land taken away and given to the Java men; they’ve flown them in from distant lands. Angwi fears for his people’s songs, the nights they danced the valley strong; the hunding grounds, steep mountain side. slash and burnTabaran: Recorded Pacific Gold Studios, Rabaul, PNG, July to August ‘88
By NedF 2025-11-2521:57 [dead]
By paxys 2025-11-261:58 So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.
Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p...
Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025.
Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million.
In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
To add some more detail regarding the new capital, Jakarta has some structural governance problems in the sense that it's very hard to improve infrastructure improve / stop the sinking of the city (mostly caused from over reliance on ground water pumping and permitting corruption / bad river management). Those problems might never be solved.
And separate of it's economic power it remains a center of power where the city mayor/governor always becomes a major national political figure.
Indonesia is actually a plurality of distinct island cultures, but with Jakarta, Java and Javanese culture sits at the top of the national political hierarchy. (Not to mention a sort of internal Javanese colonialism similar to the USSR).
The new capital could be part of dismantling some of the legacy internal Javanese power structures.
(To add a further detail re. Java vs. Indonesia, because of the mercator projection it's hard to see how big Indonesia is. It would stretch from Maine, past California almost to Anchorage).
New capitals also help prevent revolutions and uprisings. It's a lot easier to have a government that's insulated from the unrest of the masses, when everyone in its capital is loyal to it.
By B1FF_PSUVM 2025-11-261:321 reply Some say the straight Paris boulevards were intended for cannon grapeshot ...
By vkou 2025-11-2617:59 France had the inverse problem, all the nobles were sequestered away in Versailles, and weren't particularly interested in actually running the state.
I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.
Other than Singapore. I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China. Jakarta has a single subway line for 42 million people. They have some light rail line and buses. If you compare this with Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing its really night and day.
The usual patterns that crop up are:
1) Lack of institutional knowledge. No one even knows how to get started and bringing in foreign expertise may be prohibitively expensive.
2) Economics don’t pencil out even in higher income countries compared to BRT systems, especially because high density and heavy traffic means the lines usually have to be grade-separated which adds additional costs compared to an at-grade system.
3) Corruption makes development impossible. No well-established processes for expropriation exist, or the country is given over to clientelism such that landlords won’t give up what they own and hamper the development process via political connections.
BRT is usually the most effective solution in places where grade-separated rail is not yet viable as it allows a right-of-way network to be established that can later be upgraded to rail. This doesn’t solve problem 3, which requires a comparatively authoritarian approach to overcome the incentive problems at play; this is why the Chinese have generally excelled in the space over the last 20 years.
By snicky 2025-11-2520:45 For anyone interested in the issues with Indonesian economy, politics and development may I suggest a great book: Indonesia, Etc. by Elizabeth Pisani.
By ghaff 2025-11-2520:40 Even in the US, a lot of right-of-ways were taken by the government for rail and, later, highways (which intersected with earlier railroads in many cases) before it would have been as difficult a process as it would be today. Not a political comment so much as an observation that it's harder to just take private land today.
1) I really don't see how it prohibilitivly expensive. Much poorer places have built them and there are tons of companies who are willing to do it. Specially if you have a 30 year plan.
2) Another one I don't buy if you have a 30 year plan. Buses have higher operating costs, need more space, have less capacity and the surrounding infrastructure gets more expensive. The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.
3) This is much more likely.
But Ill grant you what BRT might allow you do to is ban cars from a corridor without to many people being angry, and that is a win by itself.
By lurk2 2025-11-2618:08 > The only thing BRT is good at, is making it easier to get start because you initially don't need ground infrastructure.
The only thing rice is good at is being a cheap source of nutrition.
By seanmcdirmid 2025-11-2521:181 reply The water table surely has something to do with it, but they could put much of it above ground like Bangkok does (erm, Bangkok should be listed as doing ok, even if they aren't doing as well as Singapore).
China built A LOT in the last 15 years. Beijing before 2008 had line 1, 2, a couple of suburban lines (13 and another one out east), and that was it. I don't think any other country has ever built infrastructure so quickly, so it isn't really fair to compare them to China.
By ecshafer 2025-11-263:27 That is a fair argument. China's level of infrastructure development is pretty absurd.
KL has subways. Even better is the KL city bus network which is free, air conditioned, and has free wifi. Despite Malaysia being a nominally muslim state, I found it multicultural and tolerant. If it wasn't for the heat and humidity, I'd consider it a great place to retire.
By YorickPeterse 2025-11-261:421 reply If you leave KL city and go to the surrounding areas, such as Petaling Jaya or Subang Jaya, it becomes more manageable (entering KL from there feels like a 5-10C temperature increase). It gets better the further you go of course, but for tourists that may be a bit tricky as it won't be as easy to get around (at least not without a car).
By ghaff 2025-11-2614:38 I was in KL for a business event. Can't say I cared for it much but it was just a few days. Didn't interact with public transit at all.
Did like Penang afterwards though.
By speedyapoc 2025-11-2521:33 Kuala Lumpur
By exidy 2025-11-265:57 It's a case of better late than never. KL has a reasonable mix of subway, monorail, elevated and suburban rail. Bangkok's above-ground BTS has been very popular and they have been building subways as well. Hanoi has a master plan and has opened its first subway line in 2021 and second in 2024. Manila is also digging subways right now and has wisely called in the Japanese to do it, given that city is simultaneously subject to typhoons, floods and earthquakes.
By projectazorian 2025-11-2522:33 Bangkok has built a lot of transit in the past decade, 6 lines on top of an already-substantial existing network. Still plenty of projects under construction as well. This alone puts it way ahead of Jakarta in terms of quality of life IMO.
By eaksa 2025-11-262:08 Jakarta doesn’t have one metro line. It has 9 lines which it variously calls light rail, commuter trains, etc. but are metro lines in all but name, in terms of frequency, infrastructure, and service patterns. It’s not quite Beijing or Tokyo, but it’s also not as wealthy as either city.
By ghaff 2025-11-2519:22 Probably a combination of overall wealth and government policies/stability/priorities. I'd probably add Hong Kong to the list of cities with pretty good public transit but, overall, it's pretty bad in that area of the world relative to cities that you'd generally consider to be "good."
By filloooo 2025-11-2519:20 Democratic governments are weak on deficit spending, especially poor ones, the debt from their tiny stretch of high speed rail almost became a scandal.
By wdb 2025-11-260:46 Or electric bikes and cars
> I am not sure why SE Asian cities aren't going as all in on mass transit like China
Eminent domain and mass demolitions were very common in 1990s-2010s China, and to a degree that I have not seen in other authoritarian and nominally communist states like Vietnam or even Laos, let alone other less authoritarian states.
Entire neighborhoods, villages, and towns were razed to build the urban areas that make up China today.
Beijing [0][1], Shanghai [2][3], and other cities across China [4] all saw massive urban demolitions until the Central Government banned them in 2021 during the Evergrande crisis [5] due to limited utility and rising urban discontent.
Back in the day, it was somewhat common to see news about some random Jie commiting a terrorist act in retaliation for being evicted from their homes [6][7] due to this urban demolition program, and partially helped Xi consolidate power as most officials affiliated with these programs were deeply corrupt, and were often felled during the anti-corruption purges (ironically, Xi oversaw similar initiatives in Zhejiang in the 2000s).
Most other governments don't see the utility of implementing a similar style of program.
[0] - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/06/sport.china
[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130324195541/http://www.unhabi...
[3] - https://archive.nytimes.com/sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
[4] - https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002775
[5] - https://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil/ministries/202108/31...
[6] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-18018827.amp
By exhilaration 2025-11-260:392 reply In Beijing alone, some activists said more than 1 million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year's Olympics.
Wow...
By ghaff 2025-11-261:48 And, while you can pick and choose data, Beijing's Olympic stadium is not really very widely used as far as I can tell. Of course you can also debate whether a lot of urban revitalization projects--even if leading to popular settings/venues--were worth the cost to neighborhoods that were basically flattened.
By bwv848 2025-11-265:28 And don't forget Beijing's forced eviction of tens of thousands of so called 'low end population' in the middle of winter.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/china-beijing-...
Even in democratic Taiwan they have this mindset to an extent - private land must not stand in the way of infrastructure.
By nguyenkien 2025-11-265:51 Heck, even US use these tactic: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/brent-cebul-tearing-do...
By alephnerd 2025-11-2522:43 Taiwan's mass urban demolition spree happened towards the tail end of authoritarian rule, and did in fact play a role in garnering mass support for the democracy movement.
After democracy, Taiwan shifted towards trying to preserve traditional neighborhoods or working to normalize unofficial neighborhoods and slums - basically adopting a bottom up instead of top down approach [0]
[0] - https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/en/Articles/Details?Guid=5fc...
Infrastructure is expensive. It costs lots of resources and human labor and intricate planning (most SE Asia cities are not looking like anything there was planned).
Most countries on the planet simply cannot afford good infrastructure. I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country on Earth.
By 47282847 2025-11-268:50 > I'm almost sure there's not even enough resources like energy and metals to create a good infrastructure in every country
As better public transport infrastructure vastly reduces the number of cars, and centralizes the requirement for both material and energy, I doubt that is the case. Buses and trains need far less of both than the population-equivalent number of cars/motorcycles.
Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.
I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.
By mortarion 2025-11-2611:11 The Netherlands had over 1000KM (621 miles) of traffic jams Monday morning.
By BurningFrog 2025-11-265:134 reply Americans use cars because we can afford them. The Indonesians would too if they could.
Most Dutch people can afford cars, but many are on bikes (including cargo/e-bikes), about 27% of all "movements" [0]. This is because of the way our infrastructure is set up, the bike is very often optimal (special bike lanes, shorter routes, better/free parking at destination or public transport hubs). Most people do own a car though.
[0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
True, but if there was a city of 40 million in the Netherlands, I'm afraid very few would venture out on bikes there too.
By teekert 2025-11-2614:34 It would be subways then, not cars I suspect. At least in a city like Rotterdam (673K inhabitants) that is by far the optimal way to get around, cars are really almost useless in the city center.
Here, most of the street is already reserved for bikes, with the sidewalks for pedestrians [0]. This is all a one way street.
By brnt 2025-11-2615:21 Car ownership correlates negatively with urbanization in NL, so no, I don't think so. And no 40M city (or 4M city) convinces me driving is an acceptable way to get around.
How would Indonesians use cars that cannot go anywhere? It's not about affording but about people/m² compression.
Here's a quick napkin math: a 1.3m² scooter can take 1-3 people, a toyota camry of 8.8m² can take 1-5 people. This gives the humble scooter aprox 3-5 times the space efficiency that of a car.
Not to mention the agility and parking benefits of scooters. There's no way any SEA city could get rid of scooters in favor of cars. Scooters are incredibly under-rated in the west and my favorite tool here in SEA - it's peak practical engineering at scale.
By BurningFrog 2025-11-2621:05 That makes sense, but I have to assume driving a scooter is a pretty dangerous way to get around a giant city?
I have biker friends who call cars "cages", and I get the sentiment. But they have a lot more concussions than any other group of people I know.
By mcmoor 2025-11-267:35 I got curious to see how many people have cars in Jakarta. While cars per capita of Indonesia is extremely low (~80 / 1000 people), the one for Jakarta is at respectable ~300/1000 people, not far from NYC at ~400/1000 people. Still far away from other cities though.
From my experience also, scooter is still heavily used even by people that have cars because there's just a lot of small roads and neighborhood where it's very unsuitable for cars. This also makes scooter taxi very popular here since it's cheaper, faster, and can reach the deepest parts of Jakarta.
By panick21_ 2025-11-269:59 Americans use a car because their infrastructure was build to support it. If they had cities like exist in South East Asia they wouldn't use it. Because if they did it would literally be no traffic, because the city would barly move and you wouldn't get anywhere.
These cities already have to much traffic while only a small number of people have cars.
Hehe. Great point. I have lived and worked in 2 Delhi and Mumbai in India. With such terrible living condition, traffic, pollution and so on it sucked the soul out of me. At least I found it so bad in Mumbai that many a times while leaving from work to hostel, I would literally cry on train platform with massive crowd pushing and shoving from all directions while trying to get into bursting at seams trains.
And this all is 20 years back. During this time thing have gone worse many times over.
By sashank_1509 2025-11-2617:03 I’ve liked living in Delhi recently, much less congested than Bengaluru that gnaws on my soul with its insane traffic. The only reasonable way to live in India is to live away from the main streets, ideally in a gated community which is a bikeable distance from work.
By Sharlin 2025-11-2519:26 > In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city which is under construction.
Because Jakarta is literally sinking into the ocean. It also has a terrible flood problem which is only going to get worse. Doesn’t bode well for the population.
By simonebrunozzi 2025-11-2621:44 Were they going to "move" Jakarta to a new location, because of climate change?
