One of the factors to consider when learning bahasa Indonesian is breaking up sentences. With the right word choices, the aspects of the sentence can be well understood. These aspects include subject, predicate, object and adverb. In Indonesian, it is common to read poetry or the news by looking for fragmented phrases. The slash (/) is often used as a punctuation mark in Indonesian to indicate a pause or the end of a sentence.
According to KBBI Volume V, a pause is defined as a short pause in speech (often before sentence elements of high information content or low probability). This shows how pauses are used in sentences to distinguish between aspects of the functions of the subject, the predicate, the object and the adverb, so that the meaning can be conveyed correctly. If the pause is not correct, then there will be an error in the understanding of the meaning, resulting in ambiguity, or it may be in the opposite proportion to what it should be.
A single slash (/) is used to indicate a short pause and can be aligned with a comma (,). The two-slash punctuation character (//) is used for longer pauses and, unlike the one-slash punctuation character (/), can align with a full stop (.).
When you are reading a poem or an article, there is one more punctuation mark that you need to be aware of: the three slash punctuation mark (/). According to Agustinus Indradi and Y. Adi Prasetya’s book “Indonesian language learning and evaluation guide” (2005: 43), the slash three punctuation mark (///) is used when the stop is very long and is usually used in the last line or at the end.
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