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How Difficult/Easy is Tagalog? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| pansitkanton Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 4599 days ago 6 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog* Studies: Korean | Message 17 of 29 22 April 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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The easiest way to predict is what are the learner's L1 and, if available and
necessary, L2. The most common hypothesis to use is whether the L1 is taxonomically related to the L2. On the other hand, it's sometimes more complicated than that. Coincidentally, there might be grammatical components of the L1 that are either present or absent in the target language such that of Tagalog which then lead to either becoming difficult or easy to be separated / distinguished from the L1 system that could predetermine whether how much challenge there would be in the acquisition. i.e. Tagalog is more agglutinative (inflections denote tense, aspect, case, sometimes grammatical number, tone) than English (usually in grammatical number of the verb -s/- es) Relatively more extensive agglutination in Tagalog could either be a boon or bane for a native English speaker such that either the vast agglutinative function [1] could be easily singled out by the learner and thus take hold of it faster, [2] could be a source of confusion for the learner since he/she was not exposed to such system, or [3] a certain function of agglutination is more difficult such as grammatical number or others (aspect, tense). There are quite a lot of possibilities. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 29 22 April 2012 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I visited the Philippines in January 2009, and in the wake of that tour I studied the verbal system.
My impression from this was that the language functions like an enormous combinatorical exercise, and once you had grasped the system it shouldn't be impossible to learn. But when half the words you look up from even simple texts aren't in your dictionaries then it is impossible. So when I had found out about that problem I dropped further studies. Edited by Iversen on 22 April 2012 at 10:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ArleneJoyce Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4520 days ago 6 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Tagalog, Ancient Greek | Message 19 of 29 15 July 2012 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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To arashikat, the original poster:
I have been learning Tagalog, focusing on pure Tagalog, and not the official Filipino, for 3 or 4 years. I lived in Manila for a year and a half. Learning the structure, general grammar, and pronunciation of Tagalog is not difficult for a native English speaker. But what is difficult is thinking like a Tagalog. While I can make a sentence that everyone understands, I forget to "soften" sentences with words like "naman" and I forget to use prefixes like "paki" and "maka" that will reveal not just what I did, but why I did it and with whom. Tagalog is a beautiful language, but I still use it very mechanically. Hopefully someday I can use it well enough to enjoy the beauty of it rolling off my tongue and not just into my ears. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4487 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 20 of 29 08 September 2012 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||
Your difficulty finding words in a Tagalog dictionary may be due to the copious use of prefixes in the Tagalog language and the morphology of the words depending on the tense, usage and connotation. Being a native speaker of Tagalog, I sorely lack the technical and linguistic terms to describe the way a verb or rootword changes and tenses involved (provided there are English equivalents to the tense). Let me take the verb "kain" or eat and see how much it can change. Please feel free to point out any mistakes, technical terminology I can use and redundancies. Native Tagalog speakers, please feel free to add to the list if you can think of anything else you can add. I'll just shoot them off the top of my head. Ready? KAIN (EAT) kain (to eat, used as an invitation), tiga-kain (one designated to eat), kumakain (present progressive), kakain (will eat), kumain (imperative, simple past), kainan (a place or event where you eat), pakain-kain (to eat sporadicly), pakain (event where you can eat), ipakain (makes someone eat something), pinapakain (feed regularly), kinain (past), papakainin (will feed), pagkain (infinitive, noun for food), pagpapakain (gerund), kakainin (something to eat in the future), papakainin (to allow to eat), magpapakain (to serve food or feed in the future), papakain (shortened form of magpapakain, used to connote it will be done in the near future), kinakain-kain (something has been eaten sporadically in the past), kinainan (eating happened at a location), kinakainan (a place where people habitually eat), kinakain (it can be eaten, currently eating). What do you think of that? 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4487 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 21 of 29 08 September 2012 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm using an iPad so I can't scroll down to edit the bottom part of my previous post but I forgot:
kakainan (a place where eating will happen), kinakainkainan (eating sporadically happens at the location), nagpakain (past tense of pakain, to feed), nagpapakain (someone who habitually feeds), magkainan (many people have an event where they will eat), magkakainan (two or more will eat each other, oh sounds sexy, if stress is on the second syllable, if stress is on the penultimate syllable an eating event will happen), magkakainkainan (will pretend to eat, or mock eating), and kainin (will eat, a direct imperative). Oh, this is longer than I thought, I haven't used the "nag" prefix enough yet (there are a couple more akin words with the "nag" prefix other than what I listed. I'll edit my earlier post above once I get to use my laptop. edit on previous post: kinakainan doesn't necessary apply only where people eat. Edited by Duke100782 on 09 September 2012 at 5:41am 3 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 22 of 29 08 September 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
That is so sexy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ArleneJoyce Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4520 days ago 6 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Tagalog, Ancient Greek | Message 23 of 29 08 September 2012 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Response to this one is below. Edited by ArleneJoyce on 08 September 2012 at 5:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ArleneJoyce Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4520 days ago 6 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Tagalog, Ancient Greek | Message 24 of 29 08 September 2012 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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The structure of dictionaries was a barrier for me, as well.
As Duke has so clearly pointed out (thank you for that useful list!) the language structure is one mass of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes. Grammars and most language tools tend to focus on that, making, as you describe it so well, a enormous combinatorial exercise. However, most languages work the same way (eat, eating, eaten, ate, eater, eatery) on a smaller scale. But we don't consciously put the words together with their roots. I don't think, "hmmm..a place where you eat must be "eat" + "ery"...". Eatery can be recognized that way if I'm not familiar with the word, but I don't go through that thought processes if I need to use the word. I realized I needed to change my mindset and started thinking "pagkain = food", not "pagkain = something you eat". Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good dictionary in the U.S. or online that was structured that way. I have a better one I got in the Philippines, but even it is too small. Google Translate to the rescue! Armed with both a standard dictionary and Google Translate, I'm finally beginning to be able to get past doing "word arithmetic" in my head when speaking and writing, using words more holistically. Words that had "fuzzy" meanings for me are now more clear, and therefore more retrievable from my memory when I need them. The knowledge of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes helps me to recognize new words. I really think native-English-speaking Tagalog learners (even analyticals like me) would be better to ignore the word structure of Tagalog at first, concentrating on direct translation to images or native language words when possible, and gathering the rules for the prefixes, infixes, and suffixes first "by feel", later supplementing "blind" memorization of vocabulary with the rules. I know my learning would have been more efficient had I taken that route. Note that this is exactly the opposite approach to what I would recommend for and English speaker learning another western European language. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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