Learning to speak the Tagalog language could be one of the most challenging tasks you may face if you are thinking of studying this Filipino language. It is therefore vitally important that you receive meta-informational support that could guide you down the treacherous path of learning a foreign language that you intend to undertake. One of the first things you should do is find out how different your target language is from the one you were born with. The following list shows the most common characteristics that make the Tagalog language very different from your mother tongue.
Abundance of words derived from Spanish
There is an over abundance of words derived from Spanish in the Tagalog language. This is due to the several hundred years of Spanish colonization in the Philippine nation. But while some words derived from Spanish retained their original meanings and changed only in spelling, others not only changed their spelling but also acquired a different meaning. The Tagalog word “siyempre”, for example, has been derived from the Spanish word “always”, but the Tagalog word has come to mean, of course, while the Spanish word has always meant always.
Preponderance of hyphenated words
The Tagalog language does not usually use diacritical marks that can make the pronunciation of a word different and therefore change its meaning. Instead of using diacritics, Tagalog uses the hyphen to provide the necessary accent on the syllable before the hyphen. This accent allows the speaker to make an imperceptible pause that makes the sound of the word meaningful and familiar to native Tagalog speakers. Hyphens also serve a very useful purpose in written Tagalog to indicate that the two words being joined should be considered as one to further clarify the meaning of the sentence. Not using the hyphen in cases where it is necessary can make the sentence look strange and confuse the meaning of the sentence.
Preponderance of the combination of letters “Ng” in words
The word “Ng” in Tagalog means in English, so naturally it would be used more often than other words, just like in the English language. Here, however, we are not talking about “Ng” as a word, but as a combination of letters found in so many words. This makes the “Ng” sound so important that it will make a big difference in your pronunciation progress if you set out to perform pronunciation exercises on words that contain the letter combination “Ng”.
Repeating syllables or words
There is a lot of repetition of both syllables and words in the Tagalog language. Repetition has many useful purposes, but the most common is to intensify the meaning of the word or increase its numerical meaning. The reason behind this tendency to repeat syllables and words is not so easy to pin down and could be indigenous to the languages โโof Malay origin. But whatever the origin of this phenomenon, it would be worth accepting it as a distinctive feature of the Tagalog language.
Flexibility of verbs in Tagalog
The Tagalog verb carries out two basic transformations. Verbs in the Tagalog language can change their form to achieve a change in the executor of the action or to make the verb affect a direct or indirect object or both. This flexibility makes the Tagalog verb a powerful element of the language, but unfortunately it also makes it more difficult to learn. The other simpler transformation is the conjugation of the verb for the present, past and future tenses, a characteristic that is not as complicated as in other languages.
Liberal use of English words
The Tagalog language makes abundant use of many English words that integrate seamlessly with the Tagalog words in the sentence. This practice is so prevalent that one often wonders if the sentence is a Tagalog sentence containing English words or an English sentence containing Tagalog words. As you know, the Philippine nation was once a colony of the United States for several decades in the 20th century. I daresay that English entered the mainstream of life in the Philippine nation at such a feverish pace that there was never enough time to properly invent a native word that can be used in place of English. Therefore, you should expect to see Filipinos often speaking in sentences that contain both Tagalog and English words and this is how a normal educated person in the Philippines would speak.
More information Website in Tagalog
There is an innovative website that helps you learn to speak the Tagalog language effortlessly and take your language proficiency to the next level. It’s called Learn More Tagalog and it offers online Tagalog language lessons that include proper audio support. It was created by a native Tagalog speaker who also speaks and writes English as a second language. The aforementioned peculiarities of Tagalog are explored in depth and numerous sample sentences are provided to highlight important points.
Learning the Tagalog language can be less painful if you have been informed in advance about the new constructions of the language, which makes your mind more prepared and predisposed to accept the more esoteric aspects of the language. Internalizing this knowledge can better prepare you to tackle the task ahead smoothly.