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I was a missionary in the Philippines for two years, which is why I can speak Tagalog. I'm better at Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a, but I'll try to help you with what I know. Nagmisyon ako sa Pilipinas nang dalawang taon kaya marunong akong mag-Tagalog. Mas magaling pa akong magsalita ng Hiligaynon at Kinaray-a, pero susubakan kitang matulungan ng mga natunan ko.
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Filipino (Tagalog)
Indonesian
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EnglishNative
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  • Answered
    To second Robin's comments, make yourself familiar with the phonetics of Tagalog. The old abakada will help you get a feel for that, as will some of Mikey Bustos' videos on YouTube.
    0 voted
    July 26, 2016
    4
  • Commented
    Like Jayson said, Tagalog is an Austronesian language and therefore uses gender-neutral pronouns. As far as equality goes, precolonial societies had gender divisions but that didn't necessarily mean that women were powerless either. Women called binukots in Visayan societies who were knowledgeable in poetry, magic and history were considered social equals with their husbands in the local nobility. Still, it has to be remembered that those societies also based a large part of their economy on raiding other tribal groups for valuables and slaves, which naturally made women particularly susceptible to violence. This obviously doesn't occur anymore and the Philippines is generally seen as a country with a lot of gender equality, especially with two female presidents in the last few decades.
    0 voted
    February 29, 2016
    0
  • Answered
    Nabasa ko sa isang article na may quotes sa presidential debate pero yun pa lang ang nakita kong may "ho".
    0 voted
    February 27, 2016
    0
  • Commented

    I think you'll find that Ilonggo is a lot less complicated than Tagalog, since there are fewer verb conjugations and other grammatical features are used differently. In my case, Tagalog came first and it felt like a relief to learn Ilonggo, since most of what I knew already could be applied pretty easily.

    Let me know if you'd like to try Ilonggo lessons with me in the future :)

    0 voted
    January 31, 2016
    0
  • Commented

    @Janet And it's good to know that someone else would like to learn it eventually :)

    0 voted
    January 5, 2016
    0
  • Commented

    I've never met anyone who speaks Chavacano but from what I've read, it sounds really interesting. Mostly, I wonder why it sounds so much more like Spanish than any other langauge in the country, given that all of them use Spanish words.

    0 voted
    December 3, 2015
    0
  • Posted
    What other Philippine languages do you speak or want to learn?

    According to Ethnologue, there are 188 languages in the Philippine language family but only Tagalog/Filipino and Cebuano are offered here on italki. In addition to these two, what others do you speak or want to learn, maybe even from one of our members here?

     

    I lived in the Philippines as a volunteer for almost two years, which I spent entirely in Iloilo Province and on the island of Guimaras. Because of this, I can speak Tagalog, Hiligaynon/Ilonggo and Kinaray-a, though I'm better at Hiligaynon because I used it the most.

     

    How about you?

     

    http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/philippine ;

    November 30, 2015
    19
    5
  • Answered
    It's a contraction of the first person possessive pronoun "ko" with "ay", which is an inversion marker used when the predicate (contains a verb or describes the subject of a sentence) doesn't come first. As a result, you usually find it following pronouns or nouns. For example, you could say "Maganda ang babae" or "Ang babae ay maganda" and they'd mean the same thing [the woman is beautiful]. Another would be "Gwapo ang gupit niya" and "ang gupit niya'y astig" [his haircut looks handsome]. Your example would come in sentences like "Ang bahay ko'y malayo sa kalsada" [my house is far from the road].
    0 voted
    November 29, 2015
    2
  • Answered
    ***PART TWO*** I'm sure you've noticed that with English or Spanish words used in Tagalog, these are conjugated as if they were native words. You can see this in examples like "eskwelahan" [combining Spanish escuela with the -han locative suffix] or "nag-email" [using e-mail as a past tense actor focus verb]. However, it's not just these two languages that have worked their way into those of the Philippines, since you can find words from Sanskrit, Malay, Indonesian, and Mandarin in the mix as well and yet we don't call these other Philippine languages anything but what they are. The fact is that languages change over time, adopting vocabulary (and rarely grammar) from their neighbors due to trade, religious influence, colonialism, and other factors. This doesn't mean that we need to call each language by a different name, only that we need to acknowledge a number of influences on the way we speak.
    0 voted
    November 29, 2015
    0
  • Answered
    Are you asking if the difference between Filipino and Tagalog is that Filipino uses English and Spanish words while Tagalog doesn't? Because that's a somewhat complicated question. The short answer would be "not really", since spoken Tagalog and Filipino really aren't that different. Now here's the long answer. According to the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, which is the Philippine government's official language body, Filipino is the national language of the Philippines and incorporates words from a variety of languages, among which are Tagalog, English, Spanish, Cebuano, and Ilocano (basically any non-Tagalog words that find their way into speech. This would define Tagalog as one of Filipino's many influences rather than its main influence, which is a weird thing to say considering that Filipino grammar is entirely from Tagalog and its vocabulary is mostly the same as well. Now this is where it gets tricky. As I said, despite to what the KWF says, Tagalog really is the main basis for Filipino. Due to 350 and about 45 years of Spanish and American colonialism respectively, both languages found their way into spoken and written Tagalog as well, but only really vocabulary (just as with words from non-Tagalog Philippine languages). This same phenomenon can be seen in every Philippine language I've encountered or studied, though usually its appearance depends on a number of factors, like the setting, age of the speaker/writer, education level, income, distance relative to a major city or town, etc. For instance, younger speakers would be more likely to use a heavy blend of English and Tagalog online, whereas an older person giving a speech may pick only one language or the other.
    0 voted
    November 29, 2015
    0