The answer depends on how much you want to master the Javanese language. For the basic level, learning Bahasa Indonesia can help you understand the sentence structure of Javanese, which follows the same format of subject-verb-object plus adverb. This means that you can easily translate word by word from one language to another. For example, the sentence “I eat rice” in Bahasa Indonesia is “Saya makan nasi”, and in Javanese is “Aku mangan sego”.
But don’t be fooled, Javanese is a whole different beast, as it has three levels of politeness (ngoko, krama, and krama inggil) that change the way you speak and write. Ngoko is the casual level, Krama is the respectful level, and Krama inggil is the supreme level. For example, the word for “you” in ngoko is “kowe”, in krama is “sampeyan”, and in krama inggil is “panjenengan”. So, learning Bahasa Indonesia will not help you much with these aspects of Javanese.
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