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How Difficult/Easy is Tagalog? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5014 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 25 of 29 25 September 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I took a summer course in Tagalog in Tokyo, 1974, by Japanese and Pilipino teachers. It was tremendously interesting -- but I found it to be the most difficult language I had ever tried. Contrary to the blogger referred to, I do think the verbs are really difficult, with all their confusing affixes and reduplications combined with surprising word-order variations. :) This is corroborated by Duke100782's impressive, but still partial, list of eat-words. On the other hand, I agree with Arlene Joyce. A language beginner should not go the analytic way, but build a robust foundation with a good set of holistically learnt phrases. And only then delve into the intricacies, if ever one should want it.
I felt that extremely straight into my marrow a couple of years ago when I had memorized a short story in Tuscarora (without even knowing the meaning or even where words began and ended). "That wasn't so hard", I thought. But when I looked into a textbook, I got really abhorred, and thought that, if I had begun with the textbook, I wouldn't have begun at all! :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hibiki_kenshin Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 4495 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Tagalog*, English | Message 26 of 29 09 October 2012 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Tagalog is easy. You just have to surround yourself with tagalog speaking friends. We have an American consultant here at our office and he learned the basic communication skills after 6 months. I think it helps also if you are really interested on learning it. :-)
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| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4575 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 29 09 October 2012 at 6:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Pronunciation for an English speaker, easy with a little practice.
Basic communication skills, not so difficult. Mastery at a C1/C2 level, very, very hard. I'm listening to a Filipino soap opera in the background as I write this, and sadly enough, 30 years after I first started trying to learn Tagalog, I still tend to treat the verbs with all of their variations and affixes as separate words instead of generating them from the roots and affixes the way a native speaker does. I have a Tagalog speaking friend I've been married to for 22 years. Tagalog is a awesome language, and it is well worth the effort to learn it as well as you can... But mastery at a high level is hard, I think. steve 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pansitkanton Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 4410 days ago 6 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog* Studies: Korean | Message 28 of 29 24 November 2012 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
^ Easier said than done, mate. You, for one, is a native speaker of Tagalog. You are supposedly to live or had lived in a predominantly Tagalog-speaking community. It is a very far cry situation for foreigners or non-native users of the language. Using language taxonomy as a basis in learning success, we can see that native speakers of Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) may find it a great obstacle to realize a great deal of inflection in the system because their languages are not that agglutinative as Philippine languages. Mind that agglutination in Tagalog does not only denote verb aspect, but also the voice or focus (to or from which is the action being done). Pronunciation might also be difficult in casual speech due to syllabic reduplication (although maybe for quite few instances) seemingly like a tongue twister. Even I find some inflected words somehow challenging to enunciate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4298 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 29 of 29 02 February 2013 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I think this a common misconceptions that one can pick up a language as one goes along immersed in a
community of native speakers. I used to believe it myself, and I will admit before I'd sometimes wonder why expats who have been living X number of years in the Philippines still can hardly go beyond a jumble of Tagalog phrases. However, having now moved to China, I find myself in a situation where I've been here for 9 months and I can barely go beyond the most basic speech. Here in China, I come across expats who have been here much longer than me, sometimes many years, but can still hardly go beyond uttering a few basic phrases in Mandarin or the local dialect. The situation for a foreigner learning Tagalog in the Philippines must be particularly difficult and it will take a concerted effort on the part of the foreigner to learn, since one can really get by in the Philippines without knowing a single word of Tagalog because most Filipinos can more or less speak English. But then, if you look on the flip side of it, precisely because only someone who has taken a sustained conscious effort and invested considerale amounts of time will learn Tagalog, a foreigner who does take the time to acquire proficiency in Tagalog will surely win the respect of native-speaking Filipino. One would surely win mine. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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