One thing which makes entering a new country a challenge, is the difficulty of not speaking the local language. Even more so if the alphabet used is not one we are familiar with. From the vietnamese additions to the latin letters, the Cyrillic languages of Slavic countries, all the way to the indistinguishable pictures of Chinese and Thai variants - we had to learn to get along with guessing, or simply not understanding. So, we were quite relieved when we learned Malay is written in latin letters. And, even more so, that English is at least the second language for nearly every inhabitant here, making it quite easy for us.

Nonetheless, Malay seems to be a quite easy language to master. Which it may seem to us, mainly, because a lot of words seem oddly familiar. And, make a lot of sense if you spoke them as German words. See above for a few examples.