Learning Philippines in the Philippines

study in Philippines

Learning Philippines in the Philippines

When describing features of a language if you leave out context of how it's spoken and who's speaking it and focus just on grammar and vocabulary, there's no way you can get a full picture of it.

Usually I title these summaries as “Why X is easy” (as I did in German and Hungarian, and why it isn't as hard as you think for Czech), because the limiting belief of a language you want to learn as being difficult will do you no good whatsoever so it's important to do away with this from the get-go. But I don't need to do that with Tagalog – not because it doesn't have complex grammatical features etc. (as you'll see below), but because Filipinos are extremely encouraging and constantly remind you how “easy” their language is. In almost every other culture I've been in they say – “Oh, you're learning X? It's such a hard language… good luck!!” It's consistent and propagated by some more than others. Native speakers of almost every language don't know how predictable they are being across the world as they say that to me. It's not based on any real information (except for selective biased examples) – it just boils down to ego and pride. Filipinos seem more modest as a culture and this can only benefit the learner from a language learning perspective. This encouragement is a crucial part of how your story in progressing in the language will go. Everybody told me right from the start that I'll do well in this mission, whether they knew my background or not. If you take on Tagalog, Filipinos will patiently and enthusiastically listen to you as you try and constantly remind you how much you are progressing, even when you just start with pleasantries. NOT having this in other languages slows you down tremendously, whether it really has complex grammar, tones etc. or not. So if you've chosen to learn Tagalog, you start off on the right foot immediately just for picking a culture that will be so receptive to you trying!

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Filipino or Tagalog?

One of the first things you should realise is that it's simply inaccurate to think that the Philippines has one unifying language. I started my trip in the country in the city of Cebu, and Cebuano/Visayan tends to be called a “dialect”, which is interesting because they are actually more different from Tagalog and less mutually intelligible than European languages that are officially counted as separate (like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian). There and later in my travels I met Filipinos who couldn't speak Tagalog. They could understand it and recognise it, but several of my friends actually used their own language with people from their part of the country or English with Tagalog speakers.

The Philippines has had a complicated history and one aspect of that in the last half of the 20th century was to pick the language spoken in Manila as the national language. Its invented label of “Filipino” was an attempt to bring people of the whole country together under one language. In non-Tagalog parts of the country you will see the language in advertisements and you'll hear it on TV or in some offices, but people on the street don't use it at all. The choice wasn't so clear cut – there were actually technically more Visayan speakers than Tagalog ones when the decision was made, and this continues to cause frustration in Visayans. (Although even the term “Visayan” is frustrating to some). Because of this I almost never heard anyone refer to Tagalog as “Filipino”. If you don't plan on living in a Tagalog speaking part of the country then I'd suggest that you start with the local language immediately instead. Finding a suitable place to live that used Tagalog was actually a challenge for me and slowed down my progress dramatically! Some of the most interesting parts of the country just don't use it.

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