What is Drops?
Drops (languagedrops.com, now owned by Kahoot!) is a vocabulary app built around one idea: learning should take five minutes and feel like a game. Each session shows an icon, plays the word, and has you swipe, match or spell it in a rapid sequence. More than 50 languages are offered, including Indonesian and Malay, with native-speaker recordings.
The free version allows one five-minute session every ten hours; Premium removes the limit, the ads, and unlocks offline use. There are no lessons, no sentences and no explanations — Drops is deliberately vocabulary only.
What Drops does well
Habit and delight. The timer, the swipes and the gorgeous illustrations make it the vocabulary app people actually open every day. The native audio is clear, and for concrete words — fruit, furniture, transport, body parts — the picture-to-word link works well and fast.
It also deserves credit for offering Malay at all; most big apps do not. And the lifetime plan means it can be a one-off purchase rather than another subscription.
Where Drops falls short
Pictures only get you so far. “Meanwhile”, “however”, “policy”, “regarding” — the words that let you read a news article or follow a meeting — have no icon, and Drops either skips them or forces an awkward illustration. The app teaches no sentences, so you never see how a word is actually used, and nothing about Indonesian grammar.
Review is weak too: words come back by topic, not by a schedule based on how well you know them. And although Drops has both Indonesian and Malay, they are two unconnected courses — you learn “kantor” in one and “pejabat” in the other and are never told they are the same thing. Finally, five minutes every ten hours is a very small free tier.
How BahasaSystem.com compares
BahasaSystem.com is a vocabulary system built for breadth and context. Its 1,500 words run from “halo” to the formal register of newspapers, in three levels and 41 themes; every card shows the Indonesian word, the Malay equivalent and a flag where they differ, with a switchable Indonesian or Malay voice. You learn the two languages as one system instead of twice.
Where Drops stops at the word, BahasaSystem.com continues: 90+ dialogues and news articles with line-by-line audio and comprehension questions show every word in use, quizzes test you, and the Interval Study deck uses FSRS to schedule reviews properly. It is free in the browser, with no five-minute timer.
The verdict: which should you choose?
Drops is a delightful supplement for concrete vocabulary; BahasaSystem.com is the main course. If you only have five minutes and want it to feel like a game, Drops. If you want to end up actually reading and understanding Indonesian and Malay, BahasaSystem.com.
Using both is fine, but if you are choosing one, choose the one with sentences, articles and scheduled review.