I thought
it was time for a language related blog post. Oh good…you are thinking :) I’m hoping somehow that some of the
burden of learning the Tagalog language will be supernaturally transferred to
you through my blog thus reducing the headache I still have after every one of
my classes. Or maybe not, let’s see.
Languages
were never really my strong point, probably because I spent most of my time
speaking German in my French class and vice versa for the entertainment of
other students. I managed an unexpected B in German purely because the question
in my final exam was “What do you do on a typical day?” and as it happened,
that was the only thing I had learnt over the course of 5 years.
When I knew
God was calling me to the Philippines, I began learning Tagalog words and odd
phrases straight away. This was when I was still on the Logos Hope Christian Missionary Ship towards the
end of 2012. My Filipino friend Arlene helped me, and I used a borrowed phrase
book. I learned the essentials needed to tell the street children to do things
or more often NOT to do things. My first phrase was “sandali lang” which means “wait
a moment,” but I was even pronouncing that wrong. However, as I was quickly
learning a lot of words, I naively thought the rest would be easy. It doesn’t
help that saying even the most basic word to a Filipino in Tagalog always
results in a ridiculously over the top amount of praise and comments like “You
know Tagalog, you are very good.”
Early
mistakes included confusing the words “pusa” (cat) and “puso” (heart) thereby
telling an audience that Jesus was living in my cat….hmmm. I was also ridiculed
by one of my street kids when I told him that he was “jealous” (inggit ka)
instead of to “take care” (ingat ka.) But by far the biggest problem I had was
that Filipinos expected me to speak English, so wouldn’t be listening for
Tagalog, and therefore wouldn’t understand it due to my accent. And that they would
often reply in English, because they want to learn English, or want to impress
me because I’m a foreigner. (Foreigners in the Philippines are treated like
royalty at times and it’s impossible to change this, i’m learning to try and be
gracious.)
My wake-up
call came as soon as I started learning Tagalog grammar (that was when the
headaches started.) It was also when I somehow told one of my language teachers
that I had stopped attending a church because the people there were too small.
Being a foreigner and tall in comparison with most Filipinos this was of
course hilarious. I had just said the words in the wrong order, and this was the
result. Other mistakes: “My coffee likes to drink me” and I told a group of
children that I liked the cockroach eating my face instead of that the
cockroach liked to bite my face, after waking up with a huge lump that locals
immediately attributed to a cockroach. Yuck!…There are many many others.
Explaining
just one English verb in Tagalog to my parents the other day via Skype had them
scratching their heads and searching desperately for a reason to end the call.
Let’s see if you can cope :)
The root word “Give” – Simple in English; Gave/Given (past) Giving
(present) Will give (future)
BUT in
Tagalog…there are 12 words and each time
you use a different one of the words you
also have to change all of the other words in the sentence. The reason is because Tagalog
doesn’t just have past, present and future tenses but also a focus/emphasis
within the sentence. You change the word used to change the emphasis in the
sentence. In English we would just use our tone of voice to do this (you also need to do this in Tagalog, in addition to everything else, by
changing your voice pitch for different syllables, to separate two
identical words and to make the words sound correct) You can use agent,
object or location focus/emphasis for nearly every verb. Like this with the word “give”.
The root word “Bigay”
Agent
focus; Magbigay (timeless) Nagbigay (past) Nagbibigay (present) Magbibigay(future)
Object focus; Ibigay (timeless) Ibinigay (past) Ibinibigay (present) Ibibigay
(future)
Location focus;
Bigyan (timeless) Binigyan (past) Binibigyan (present) Bibigyan (future)
Want to
learn anymore? Didn’t think so!
The vast numbers
of variations continue in every aspect of the language e.g., there are 8 different
ways to say a person is very tall rather than the 3 in English. Of course, I have
to learn all of them so that I can understand if any of them are used (at least
that’s my teacher’s logic.) There is also an extra letter in the alphabet “ng”
which is very hard for a Westerner to pronounce, and they only half pronounce
their “t’s” I learnt this when singing in church, it’s amazing how loud that “t”
is when no one else is singing it. My teacher tells me to “swallow my t’s” but I
haven’t quite figured out how to do this.
The funny
thing (or annoying depending on your perspective) is that the Filipinos think
that English doesn’t make any sense because of words like “cough” and “cow” and
the other anomalies of the language. But from my perspective, the only easy
thing about Tagalog is that most of the time the words are spelt as they sound.
And I cannot for the life of me work out WHY there needs to be a particular
focus in a sentence which definitely quadruples the number of words required
and confusion rendered to a Westerner. “Aaah” the locals say, “Tagalog is clever
because as soon as you hear the verb you know what the focus of the sentence
is.” (They start the sentence with the verb as well which is also the opposite
to English). Honestly, knowing the focus of the sentence is the least of my
worries when I’m trying to work out the meaning of all of the other words,
which order they go in, which time tense to use and where to use the
tones/gluttal stop etc etc etc……
Please
forgive me for offloading this onto you…typing this has made me feel better. I’m
sure anyone learning a new language has the same difficulties. Any Filipino
readers, no offence intended. I love your country…honestly!
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