A friend in Jakarta once texted me "besok gue ke Bandung ama temen" and I stared at it for a good minute. I knew besok, I knew gue, I knew Bandung. The word ama meant nothing to me. I eventually worked out it was sama with the first syllable knocked off, and that in this sentence sama meant "with", which was not what my textbook had taught me it meant.
My textbook had taught me that sama means "same". That is true, and it is also the least useful thing you can know about the word. In everyday Indonesian, sama has quietly taken over the jobs of at least four other words: dengan, dan, kepada and oleh. Once you notice this you start hearing it everywhere, several times a minute, doing something slightly different each time.
The dictionary version
Start with the meaning you were taught. Sama is an adjective meaning "same" or "equal".
Harganya sama. The price is the same.
Kita sama-sama orang Inggris. We're both English.
Dua tambah dua sama dengan empat. Two plus two equals four.
That last one is worth noticing because it uses sama dengan as a unit, literally "same with". This is the formal, careful way of saying two things match, and it is the phrase that gives away where the "with" meaning came from in the first place. Sama dengan got shortened over time until sama on its own could carry the dengan job.
There is a trap sitting right next to this. Sama sekali does not mean "very same" or "same once". It means "at all", and it almost always appears with a negative: nggak enak sama sekali (not tasty at all), saya sama sekali tidak tahu (I have absolutely no idea). If you already know sekali as the word that turns enak into enak sekali, this one will trip you, because it is a fixed phrase that ignores both of its parts. I wrote about that family of words in more detail in the piece on sangat, banget and sekali.
Sama as "with"
This is probably the most common job it does. Where a textbook would write dengan, spoken Indonesian usually says sama.
Aku pergi sama Rina. I'm going with Rina.
Nasi goreng sama telur. Fried rice with egg.
Dia tinggal sama orang tuanya. He lives with his parents.
You can say dengan in all of these and nobody will misunderstand you. You will just sound like a news presenter. I spent my first few months in Indonesia saying dengan because it was what I had studied, and the reaction was never confusion, it was a sort of polite amusement, the way an English speaker might react to someone saying "with whom shall I go".
One thing sama does not cover is the instrumental "with", the one where you use a tool. For that you want pakai: makan pakai tangan (eat with your hands), potong pakai pisau (cut with a knife). Saying makan sama tangan suggests your hand is joining you for lunch.
Sama as "and"
Order food anywhere in Indonesia and you will hear this one within a day.
Saya mau nasi goreng sama es teh. I'll have fried rice and an iced tea.
Beli gula sama kopi. Buy sugar and coffee.
Note that this only works for joining nouns, and usually only two of them, usually short ones. You cannot use sama to join two clauses. Saya makan sama saya minum is not a sentence. For linking whole ideas you still need dan, or more likely terus in casual speech, which functions as "and then". Learners who have decided that sama equals dan tend to overshoot here and produce sentences that make Indonesians pause.
Sama as "to" or "at" a person
This is the one that took me longest to hear properly, because English uses a different preposition for almost every verb in this group, and Indonesian just uses sama for all of them.
Bilang sama dia. Tell him.
Aku marah sama kamu. I'm angry at you.
Dia suka sama aku. She fancies me.
Jangan bohong sama ibu. Don't lie to your mother.
Kasih sama adik aja. Just give it to your little brother.
The formal equivalents here are kepada and pada, which you will see in writing and hear in speeches, and which sound stiff in a warung. What matters is that a whole set of emotional verbs takes sama for its target: liking, hating, being annoyed with, being embarrassed in front of, being nice to. Suka sama is worth a special mention because suka on its own with an object means you like a thing (aku suka kopi), while suka sama with a person usually carries a romantic edge. Saying aku suka sama kamu to a colleague is not the neutral compliment you might think it is.
Sama as "by"
In the passive, standard Indonesian marks the agent with oleh. Casual Indonesian almost never bothers, and uses sama instead.
Kuenya dimakan sama adik. The cake was eaten by my little brother.
Motorku dipinjam sama Dedi. My motorbike got borrowed by Dedi.
Since Indonesian reaches for the passive far more often than English does, you will run into this constantly. If the passive itself is still shaky for you, the post on how Indonesian uses di- verbs covers why so many everyday sentences come out passive when an English speaker would use an active one.
So how do you know which one it is?
You mostly don't have to think about it, which is the good news, but there is genuine ambiguity in the middle of all this and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Ali sama Budi ke Bandung can mean Ali and Budi went to Bandung, or Ali went to Bandung with Budi. In practice the difference rarely matters. When it does, the speaker will use dan or bersama to be clear, or simply restructure the sentence.
The rough guide, and it is rough, is positional. Between two nouns, sama is "with" or "and". After a verb of speaking or feeling, it is "to" or "at". After a di- verb, it is "by". Sitting alone next to an adjective or a noun phrase, it is "same". Your ear picks this up faster than your grammar notes will.
Sama-sama and the fixed phrases
Double it and you get a different set of meanings again. Sama-sama is the standard reply to terima kasih, our "you're welcome". It also means "both" or "all of us equally": kita sama-sama capek (we're all tired). And it works as "likewise" when someone wishes you something: say selamat makan to a friend and sama-sama comes back at you.
Then there is sama aja, which is a small piece of Indonesian pessimism meaning "it makes no difference". You will hear it about politicians, phone networks and traffic routes. Mau lewat mana pun sama aja, macet. Whichever way you go it's the same, it's jammed.
Where sama will make you look sloppy
All of the above belongs to spoken and informal Indonesian. In a formal email, a university assignment, an official letter or anything you would put on a company website, sama in these functions reads as careless. Use dengan for "with", dan for "and", kepada for "to", oleh for "by". Indonesian keeps a wider gap between its written and spoken registers than English does, and the gap is a real thing people are marked on at school and judged on at work. The same split shows up with tidak and nggak, where picking the wrong one can make you sound either cold or unprofessional depending on which way you get it wrong.
My own approach, for what it's worth, is to use sama freely when speaking and never when typing anything that has a subject line. That has served me well enough. It also means the formal words stay live in my head rather than becoming things I can only recognise.
What it looks like in the wild
In chat you will rarely see the full word. Jakartans shave it down to ama or just ma, and in typed messages it usually appears as sm. Gue lagi di kafe sm Sari. I'm at a cafe with Sari. If you have been quietly baffled by two-letter words in your WhatsApp groups, this is one of the more common culprits.
Older speakers and people outside Java tend to use the full sama, and some will use dengan in casual speech where a Jakartan would not. None of this is a hard rule. It is closer to an accent than a dialect.
The practical takeaway is small but it changes how much you understand: when you hear sama and the sentence seems to be about sameness but obviously isn't, it is doing one of these other four jobs, and the position in the sentence will tell you which. Most learners work this out by accident after a few months. You can just decide to know it now.
If you want to practise Indonesian with sentences that sound like the ones people actually say rather than textbook set pieces, that's more or less why we built the app. You can sign up and work through it free, and have a look at our plans if you want the full set of exercises.