What is Tagalog or Filipino?

Tagalog is what you call the Filipinos living in the National Capital Region of the Philippines while Filipino refers to the official language of the country. However, many are mislead by the confusion in the usage of these words, and for many, Tagalog means the language itself. Tagalog in this blog will be used to refer to the language and the people.

Now, let’s talk about some of the interesting facts about learning Tagalog or Filipino and why it isn’t as hard as you think it is. Filipino language is a mix of many languages mainly English and Spanish given the fact that Philippines was a colony of America that shaped the education system of the country and Spain that molded the people’s behavior through religion for 300 years.

Filipino language is easily understood because in many cases, the sentences are conjugated with English words so the bits and pieces of the sentences help the listener understand the message.If you travel outside Manila particularly in the provinces, you will hear many Spanish words spoken in different dialects particularly the names of streets, people, buildings and numbers, days and dates. Majority of the Filipinos can understand and speak English at different levels. The main thing is, wherever you go, you can use simple English to communicate with the locals when traveling in the cóuntry and you wont get lost, or even better speak some important Tagalog phrases for traveling. It is simple to make simple sentences in Filipino if you know the correct way to use the verbs in its different tenses. Conjunctions and pronouns are easy to use in a sentence if you have a structure to follow. Like learning Finnish, some of the sentence structures are hard to understand depending on your mother tongue, that’s why as a language student myself and a former Filipino language teacher I find it important to give students some effective ways to learn the language without even understanding the whole process in the beginning. This method works for me and hopefully it works for you too.

Want to practice and gain confidence in your spoken Tagalog? You can join my membership course and get real Tagalog talk practice with native speakers.