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How Difficult/Easy is Tagalog? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
 arashikat Diglot Pro Member United States Joined 4676 days ago 53 posts - 80 votes  Speaks: Tagalog*, English Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 29 10 February 2012 at 7:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was browsing through the forum and was very surprised to find out that there *really* are individuals who study Tagalog (technically it's called Filipino, but none of us in the Philippines really called it that). I mean, Tagalog isn't exactly a language that people study (a la French or Japanese), unless for very special reasons.
As a native speaker of the language, I haven't a clue what it's like for other speakers. Is it hard? Easy? Complicated? Logical? Convoluted? What does it sound like to others? I'm very interested in this, and I'd really love to gain more insight into my native languages (from the eyes of those who study it, or at least those who have heard it). Thanks! 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5414 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 2 of 29 10 February 2012 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, given that some folks here are studying the likes of Sanskrit and Irish Gaelic, I'd say the national language of a relatively well-known country of 94 million people isn't really all that obscure.
A century from now, it might even be more popular than French or Japanese. :) With respect to its difficulty, it's supposedly got a more complicated grammar than the other main Austronesian language that might be studied abroad—Indonesian—although the latter was intentionally designed to be simple. Pronunciation-wise, it's fairly straightforward for anyone who speaks an Indo-European language (and probably for most others as well). I'm not terribly familiar with this issue, but it also seems to make significant use of honorific language and levels of politeness as well, which is an unfamiliar concept for most Indo-European speakers, and Anglophones in particular. Edited by nway on 10 February 2012 at 9:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6436 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 3 of 29 10 February 2012 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I remember hearing that it's pretty hard; significantly more difficult than Spanish (which I'm told it's slightly similar to?). I can't remember why it was hard, though.
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| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4956 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 4 of 29 10 February 2012 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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It has similar vocabulary to Spanish but I don't think is anything like it grammatically.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 29 11 February 2012 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||
I'd love to learn Tagalog (but it falls into my "too many languages, too little time" category for the time being). It strikes me as a relatively difficult language. It sounds normal to me, because I grew up around it (but I don't know even the most basic things) - it's hard to describe it further. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4771 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 6 of 29 11 February 2012 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
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The language blogger Yearlyglot wrote this post about Tagalog. Apparently he considers its grammar really easy. The thing that I find most puzzling about Tagalog is the Austronesian alignment - I can hardly wrap my head around even ergative (this page helped a little), let alone an alignment that has elements of both accusative and ergative. The fact that Yearlyglot makes no mention of this whatsoever suggests that either it isn't such a big deal, or that he never got that far in his studies of Tagalog grammar.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6701 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 7 of 29 11 February 2012 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I only studied it for a couple of months, but the impression that I got was that it wasn't terribly hard, though there were some weird parts to it. It's an Asian language, and like most Asian languages it doesn't have a lot of the grammatical dross that European languages have. No gender, no cases, no adjective agreement, plurals not often used, and when they are it's just repeating the word twice, that sort of thing. It also had a fair amount of Spanish loan words, which is no surprise after 400 years of Spanish rule. IIRC they primarily count in Spanish numbers. Also, I don't remember any strange sounds that you'd have to learn.
The one weird part was the verbs. It's been a long time since I learned it, so I don't remember clearly, but one of the guys who was teaching me said that the verbs were the hardest part. They used infixes to show changes, and sometimes were kind of irregular. Over all, I remember it being not that hard. It was mostly about learning words and learning the verbs; the grammar was pretty cut and dried. It's an exotic, though, so there were a lot of non-cognates, though a lot of Spanish and English loan words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 29 11 February 2012 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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What little I've heard is that Tagalog is difficult to learn because of the massive amounts of code switching of the native speakers. Someone said that just about nobody in the cities speaks "pure" Tagalog, but rather a mixture of Tagalog and English called "Taglish". This would be different from most languages that incorporate loan words (a very common thing) in that in Taglish you get entire phrases and sentences in English. I'd love to see someone expound on that.
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