Trying hard in Tagalog

I think of learning Tagalog as planting seeds in my head, with a fervent hope that they will someday blossom into beautiful phrases and sentences, complete and pretty to the ear.

Still, two months into Tagalog lessons, I keep mangling the language, spraying it with DDT, then desperately fertilizing it with manure. Words learned in my Tagalog class are quickly forgotten as soon as I zip up my backpack and leave the learning center in Shangri-La mall. I have tried on occasion to summon a word here and there in real-life situations. The results can be comical. I was on a beach somewhere with my wife’s flamenco friends when a bloodsucking insect settled on one friend’s bare arm. An inspiration flashed in my mind: I know what that is! In Tagalog! Yet somehow, between my memory and actual retrieval, the word shortcircuited. “Manok!” I cried out, pointing at the mosquito, which was as confused as everybody else by my outburst. I mean, the thing was big, but it wasn’t a manok, which means chicken; she did not, in fact, have a chicken fastened to her arm. I had meant lamok.

Why do Tagalog words get so mangled in my mind? Why do they come out tragically wrong most of the time?

It might be a hearing problem I have. Tagalog words with similar rhythms, I tend to lazily transpose; I don’t mean to confuse mosquitoes with chickens, it just happens because I’m so eager.

Also, some Tagalog words are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently and with different meanings. Baka comes to mind (it can be “cow” or “maybe,” depending on how it’s spoken. Also suka, which I tend to think of as the noun for vinegar. If I hear it paired with a sour expression after someone eats something (“Nakakasuka”), I think something is asim, or sour. Actually, they’re saying it makes them want to throw up. So there are many pathways to confusion.

It probably doesn’t help us hapless foreigners that native Tagalog speakers mercilessly correct us whenever we say the wrong word, accent the wrong syllable, or fail to remember how to pronounce “ng” (Sorry, us English speakers are just too used to seeing “ng” at the ends of words, and maybe that’s how we get hung up, and hang ourselves.)

 My instructor has abandoned the time-tested Berlitz game plan and is largely improvising with me, it seems. My failure to commit massive amounts of verbs and nouns to memory means he has been forced to lower the bar quite a bit in order for me to complete my 20 session hours. He looks for shortcuts, perhaps realizing I am a lost cause. Recently, he lit upon the “mag” solution. He informed me it’s a quick way to insert a bit of English into a sentence if you want to invite somebody to do something: “Mag-KFC!” works just as easily as laboriously constructing a sentence in Tagalog telling a friend you’d like to meet up at a nearby fried chicken joint. So, “mag” this and “mag” that. Hey, I’ve never been one to turn down a shortcut.

In fact, it seems that Filipinos also love making things easier… for themselves. My instructor says most Pinoys like to get to the point with as few words as possible, instead of getting all formal. This is probably why “formal” Tagalog, when used in real-life situations here, just tends to draw curious stares or titters. Nobody in the Philippines talks like a textbook. Taglish is the most obvious example of how ad hoc the language has become here. Just throw in some English, either because there’s no Tagalog equivalent, or because nobody actually bothers to use the long Tagalog word for, say, driver (tagapagmaneho); they just say “driver.” Or more accurately, “drayber.” 

We’ve been going over interrogatives. Bakit (why) is an interesting one, because — according to my instructor — when you answer a “Why?” question, you can either take responsibility by prefacing your answer with kasi (because…), or you can shirk blame completely by answering with dahil, which indicates the reason you were late, or absent, or whatever fault you committed was totally out of your control. I love that! Finally, a way to throw the universe under the bus, instead of taking the rap! “Dahil there was a flood, or an earthquake, or a fire.” But you cannot say: “Dahil trapik.” (There was traffic.) It just doesn’t hold up in the court of public opinion as an excuse anymore.

But mostly, I find myself lost in all the arcane rules. Din (“also”) magically changes into rin if the preceding word ends in a vowel. Is that really necessary? Must we arbitrarily switch the consonants around like that?

I also learn that Filipino language doesn’t have any plurals — they just stick either ang (for a singular “an”) or ang mga (for the plural “many”) in front of the noun. You don’t say “carabaos”; you say “mga carabao.” Yet how come when Filipinos import English words like “luggage” or “footage,” they happily stick an “s” at the end to make it plural, resulting in “luggages” and “footages”? Just asking.

Yet sometimes, I can see the pieces start to fit together. You look at a sentence on the whiteboard and, suddenly, the words that before seemed to hang there like a bunch of vowel-heavy, overripe grapes dangling off a sagging branch start to make sense: I know what this means… I actually get it! You know how it could all make sense, if you just had the ability to keep everything stuck together. But it’s like someone handing you a broken china vase, badly glued together: you look at it the wrong way, and it just falls to pieces again. Sayang.

The most useful phrase I’ve picked up in my past few sessions, one that I can’t believe I’ve lived here this long without learning and putting on speed dial?

Ewan ko. “I don’t know.”

Second most useful phrase?

Nagsisikap ako. “I am trying.”

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