Lesson 33 Sangat (Very)
CONGRATULATIONS! BRAVO! FELICITATIONS! SYABAS! Without fanfare but with dogged determination you have already completed half of the course and you are now embarking upon the second half. I know what it means to struggle through a language course on one's own so please allow me to take my hat off to you on your remarkable achievement. - pgohClick to listen {{ @audio | raw }}
A second reading (by Muhammad Nor Ismat, a native speaker)
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Ini sangat mahal! Dia sangat marah. Ini sangat mustahak. Dia sangat lapar. |
This is very expensive! He is very angry. This is very important. He is very hungry. |
mahal = expensive murah = cheap marah = angry mustahak = important lapar = hungry |
More examples:
Dia sangat pandai (He is very clever)
Kopi ini sangat panas (This coffee is very hot)
Note the difference between the above sentence and this: Kopi ini TERLALU panas, saya tidak dapat minum sekarang. (= This coffee is TOO hot, I am not able to drink it now.)
Another word that is more frequently used in the place of mustahak, especially in Indonesia, is penting. But both words are equally used in Malaysia so you will have to remember both of them.
It is not often that I receive feedback from students so I was very happy to receive the following email from Amy, an advanced student of Malay, on 24 February 2022. I am reproducing her email in full (with her permission) below as it could be of interest to other students. I had put my comments on her observations in italics in my reply but the italics didn't appear in the converted .pdf file. The only way to know who is writing is to look at the font size. It turned out that her font size is smaller than mine!
There is another word for "very" though it is a little bit more formal than sangat. The word is amat eg. Barang ini amat mahal (This item is very expensive) or Dia amat pandai. (He is very intelligent.)
The word barang is quite a useful word to know as you can use it when you don't know the name of an object or are not bothered to call it by its name. Its equivalent in English would be "thingummy" or "thingy". If you want to find out what the name of something is in Malay, for instance, you could just point at the article and ask Apa nama barang ini?
And what is another word for barang, do you remember? It also starts with the letter "b" (you will find it in Lesson 19).
As you would have noticed in the table above, the two very commonly-used adjectives (murah meaning "cheap" and marah meaning "angry") can get you mixed up as they are quite similar to each other. In order to be clear which is which, how about shouting out now in a very angry manner Saya MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARAH! (= I'm ANNNNNNNNNNNNNGRY!). It might work, I don't know ;-) But first make sure that your wife or husband or children or office colleagues are not around or they will think that you are gila (mad)!
| ENGLISH | INDONESIAN | MALAY |
|---|---|---|
| important | penting | mustahak |
| This is very important. | Ini sangat penting. | Ini sangat mustahak. |
| Note that "penting" is as much used as "mustahak" in Malaysia. | ||