Tagalog/Why study Tagalog

Hello fellow reader and welcome to this tutorial on the Tagalog language. As a major Philippine language and, as Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, Tagalog can help you get by in the Philippines better.

Why Study Tagalog?

• The next time you visit the Philippines, you don't need to take your Tagalog-English English-Tagalog dictionary when asking where the toilet is.

• Speaking Tagalog helps you to gain more Filipino friends.

• You hate the Western Cold weather and finding some beaches to sunbathe in and communicating in Tagalog the next time you visit the country will help you to NOT-GET-LOST when touring around. (The Philippines might have a large population of English speakers but this doesn't mean that everyone in the country understands English fluently.)

• You might get pissed when some of the Filipino people start talking in Tagalog and you might think they're talking about you, learning Tagalog will help you understand what they're talking about and the next time you see some talking in Tagalog you won't get a misinterpretation of what they're talking about.

• You're obsessed of eating Filipino foods but you don't understand the menu because it's written in pure Tagalog. After learning some Tagalog you will understand what the menu says and you'll know what you're consuming.

• You might also love reading literature, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by José Rizal are mostly translated into Tagalog however its main form was in Spanish, you might not understand Spanish nor Tagalog, but after studying Tagalog the books will catch your heart.

Demographics

Tagalog is the native language of 22 million Filipinos and is the largest of all the Philippine languages. More than 65 million people, roughly about three-fourths of the Philippine population, have learned Tagalog as their second language to varying degrees of comprehension.

Tagalog is one of the keys to Philippine culture. By studying it, you unlock an amalgamation of Malay, Arab, Indian, Latin and European cultures.

However, there are catches to learning Tagalog. For example, accentation can differentiate different forms of a word with the same spelling (as in hapon, which can mean either "afternoon" or as a reference to Japan), as in Spanish, but accents are usually not written. This can create confusion at first.

Also, Tagalog can use different word orders but that mean the same thing: an example is the Wikipedia slogan, which can be translated as Ang Malayang Ensiklopedya (the English word order) or Ang Ensiklopedyang Malaya (the Spanish word order).

Learning Tagalog, however, can be made easier if one knows how to speak Spanish or languages such as Malay or Indonesian, which Tagalog either has cognates or has borrowed words from. It helps create a better learning experience.

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