Making Out in Tagalog: A Tagalog Language Phrase Book

Introduction

Making Out in Tagalog is your passport to the living, breathing, colorful language spoken on the streets of the Philippines. It is the first easy book to give you access to the casual, unbuttoned Tagalog that will allow you to express yourself in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, in crowded marketplaces, and at train and bus stations. Here you will find the warm-hearted language that you can use with new acquaintances, good friends or perhaps, a potential significant other, and also the rough-and-tumble language you can fall back on when you are ready to either attack or defend yourself or someone else in certain situations.

This brand of Tagalog is simple and direct. It is spoken mainly in Metro Manila, large cities, provincial capitals, and town centers but can be understood in most places in the Philippines. It has shed the complex grammatical twists and turns of the highly formal language that textbooks and language courses strive so hard to teach.

Making Out in Tagalog will be a useful companion throughout the Philippines—whether in cities, traveling in remote barrios or talking with Filipinos anywhere in the world. So you want to meet people, make friends, eat out, go dancing, or just engage in friendly chitchat? A quick glance at Making Out in Tagalog and you’ll have the language at your fingertips.

OVERVIEW

If you have spent several years grappling with the complicated grammatical structures of French, German, Italian or Spanish, you will find Tagalog, especially the informal version in this book, a joy.

Tagalog is the main language in Manila, the capital of the Philippines and its surrounding areas. It is the lingua franca of Filipinos in the Philippines as well as in other parts of the world. With over 150 languages and their various dialects, Filipinos in the Philippines as well as in other parts of the world use Tagalog as their lingua franca. By the way, Tagalog is recently considered the most spoken Southeast Asian language in the U.S. One of the eight major Philippine languages, Tagalog belongs to the Austronesian family of languages which includes Malay, Indonesian, and Hawaiian.

An easy-going language spoken today on the streets of the Philippines, Tagalog is one of the many local languages in the country that developed over the centuries as traders from different ethnic groups mixed and mingled from all parts of the world. From as early as the 12th century, Chinese and Arab traders flooded the language with their own vocabularies, as did the neighboring islands of Indonesia and mainland Asia, and later the Spanish and the Americans. For the next 300 years after the Spanish colonization of the islands in 1565, the Philippines became a melting pot where the east met the west. The Philippines, particularly in its economy, society and culture, was forever changed. The west and its people brought with them distinctly new ways of living, believing, creating and relating to others that changed and eventually enriched the spoken language.

The almost 50 years of American occupation from 1898 onwards added to the western outlook of the Filipinos in dealing with one another, and particularly with the outside world.

TAGALOG ALPHABET

The Tagalog alphabet has 20 letters: 5 vowels and 15 consonants.

The five (5) vowels are:

and 15 consonants:

If Tagalog has 15 letters in its alphabet, Filipino which is the Philippine national language has 28 letters—which includes all of the 26 letters of the English alphabet plus ng and ñ. The letters C, F, J, Ñ, Q, V, X, and Z are used mainly in names of people: Corazon, Josefa, Victoria; places: Quezon, Luzon, Zamboanga, Cebu; things: Kleenex, Xerox; and in English loanwords.

PRONUNCIATION

Tagalog words are relatively easy to pronounce. They are in fact read or pronounced as spelled or written except for ng (nang) and mga (ma-nga). All the letters in a word are sounded and there are no silent letters. If a word has two successive vowels, then each vowel is treated as separate syllable and pronounced.

For example: MA-A-A-LA-LA-HA-NIN. By the way, this seven-syllable word