Learning Tagalog

[Jim]

Here’s a report on my progress learning Tagalog. Since I am about a third of the way toward learning my third foreign language [and my original job in he US was French teacher] I will offer some language learning tips for those of you who are just getting started.

I have been actively studying for nine to ten month for one hour a day but probably only four days a week due to other pressing matters [sleeping, drinking, watching TV, the usual hectic life of a retiree]. I would put my total study time between 150 and 200 hours.

I am almost entirely self taught with an occasional question for Mitch or Grace. I bought a decent text book which has three volumes and I am presently almost done volume two for the second time through. I can now make simple sentences which impresses EVERYONE since almost no foreigners here bother to study any Tagalog. It is hard for me to understand spoke Tagalog. I ask Mitch to speak slowly and pause between each work. At this point things should move smoothly and I expect to be conversant within the next year.

The first part of learning a language is vocabulary and basic sentence structure. Tagalog vocabukary has about a 5% overlap with Spanish [words like banyo, trabaho, guwapo, puwede] but the other 95% are confusing. 75% of adjectives begin with ma for example and since they use fewer letter (P instead of F, K instead of C) lots of words are close [mainp bored, mainis disgusted]. That’s the hardest part.

Verbs are incredibly simple. THERE ARE NO IRREGULAR VERBS. There are four groups of verbs and three are virtually identical. Also there are no genders for nouns so adjectives don’t change and no pluralization. You just add mga [pronounced magna] for plural.

Nouns do have three cases. The ang case is the subject, ng is the direct object or shows possession and sa is for [prepositions]. In fact sa replaces almost all of the English prepositions which is also easy/

I am 61 so if I can learn a new language, I am sure everyone here is capable of learning Spanish. A few suggestions if you are studying Spanish on your own.

(1) The harder you make it on yourself, the more you will learn. Write everything instead of doing it orally and save it to impress yourself with your effort. I am now working on my third notebook with every line of every page covered with Tagalog.

For example if your book has a fill in the blank (el, la) libro es en (el, la) mesa.
Read the sentence to yourself, keep it in your head and write the entire sentence correctly without looking back at the book. Mastering a language requires you to keep lots of stuff in your head.

(2) Create a vocabulary study list on a computer spreadsheet and modify it after every couple of lessons removing the works you have mastered and adding new ones.

[Jay_D]

Great post...writing it down definitely reinforces the concept and makes for easy review as well. Without a grasp of the language it makes it extremely difiicult to understand the culture or your mate for that matter. Congrats on your achievement!

Jim, I think it's wonderful you are learning Tagalog. Here in the U.S. most filipino's (and filipina's) despise the act of anyone learning their language. I guess it's their secret code and without the secret code, they have lost 100% of their power. Some have tried to sabatoge me learning even the simplest of words. Today I answered a filipina in Tagalog and I could tell she didn't like it.

[catuabalover]

Thanks Jim for your tips. Been to philippines a few times myself, now married to a brazilian. Trying to learn portugese is hard. I will make it hard on myself, good tip.