Quarterly Tagalog Review

06 Nov, 2025

Three months ago I've started my Tagalog¹ journey proper. And by proper, I mean that I pay a lady to chit chat with me on Sunday mornings. She's quite cool and it was definitely needed. I think three months is basically a semester, right? Which is kinda crazy, what a short amount of time to learn anything. The amount of time sounds meaningful enough that I thought I'd write some kind of review, how has it been going, why and what's to come.

## The first encounter

I've first learnt about the existence of the Philippines when I was obsessed with Trauma Center series. There were animators on YouTube doing funny videos with the characters, and it was really cool. I think they were about 14 to 16 years old and I admire their patience for animation. At the time I think I was about 11. Anyway, the people making those Trauma Center animated skits were inspired by this lady from the Philippines, who was making the same thing but for the Resident Evil series. She made one video where she, I think, used a Hatsune Miku song? Or it was something else with Japanese in it. She put in a joke, where the song/audio says "baka", which we weebs all know means stupid. Her being a Filipina, she made a joke about it meaning cow in Filipino. And that's how I learnt my first Filipino word. Very fun. Is this important to my language learning journey like 15 years later? ...yes.²

Filipino flag out in the wild.

## Goals and motivations

I lucked out big time in meeting the most amazing and funny person I could have ever met. And they liked me enough to keep talking to me, every day, for many years. I love them so much. And, yeah, that's the reason. Although, it's not to be kind to them via learning their native language, because they say they don't know it that well anymore, I just want to be lovingly annoying. Like, wouldn't it be so funny if I spoke better than them. I think it would be so funny. Worst case scenario, I'll be cutely annoying with how bad I speak.

But of course, I have more silly reasons. They do show me sometimes their jokes they write to their family. Would be nice to understand them fully. I received the Hello! wafers from them and I enjoy the jokes in the back. When they visited me for the first time, I was so surprised on how many people spoke Filipino that I never noticed. And I like gossip. I'm big into gossip. I thought it would also be funny to learn a “niche” language to listen to rare gossip. And when I get to meet their family properly, I'll know if they're complaining about me, haha. Hopefully! (Well, hopefully no complaints as well.)

## Let's progress!

I think I tried finding some online resources one day. Like, online free textbook looking resources. The problem was though that it either was very pure Tagalog, so it didn't make sense to me at all - too many repeating syllables forming very long words - or it was very Spanish-y and then they hit you with “Ikinagagalak kong makilala ka.”

So, I didn't really know how to start. There is no Duolingo for Tagalog for some reason. I did find/remember a website called Clozemaster. I used it for Japanese. And I saw that they did offer Tagalog. So, I tried it and the first sentence was something about death. That was very funny. And - too many syllables!

I did give up for a while. Especially since my significant other replied to my screenshot of the funny sentence with, why are you learning Tagalog. So, I was a bit embarrassed for no reason, haha!

When they came to visit me for the first time, that was the first time I properly heard spoken Filipino. Figured out that I wouldn't recognize the language on my own, didn't know it that much. When we met again, we met so many more Filipinos, right, and my significant other did their best with translating all the gossip, I'm sure, but it was also very short. That was a good motivation to start again.

Some weeks ago, my significant other returned home, I booked an Italki class. And just the first class helped a lot. I got told that people don't really use the long, weird words. I was explained what some of the random syllables mean. With the subsequent lessons I figured out there is some system. It's a very cool system. There is a lot of prefixes, infixes and suffixed. Most languages have that, for sure. My native language does too. Infixes are a bit weird, but understandable. It is so organized, though. The root always stays the same, so if you can distinguish a root word and its meaning in any kind of word, you can guess, kinda, sorta, what it means, or what it is related to. What was very helpful to me was just understanding what words to expect in regular sentences, learn some basic grammar words (and, on/in/at, with, because, while), and now it's so much easier to learn, because I can tell what the sentence is trying to tell me. I might not know the words, but I know there is something done with a noun at a location. I did end up going to Clozemaster again. I don't know many words, still. I do know how to tell if the unknown word is a verb or noun and I can make educated guess. I think that makes Clozemaster helpful now for me.

I would recommend finding a teacher, for sure, especially if the language you're learning is very different to your native language / language you already know. I didn't have that big of a problem with Japanese. I started learning it earlier... But I think what made Japanese easier to me was the fact it has different alphabet. If you write Japanese in romaji it's a mess and everything looks the same, just like Tagalog, right, but the different writing system really helps. I am glad I didn't have to learn another one, although one day I would like to try it - there is baybayin script for some of the Filipino languages. It looks quite fun. I think my name would be ᜉᜊᜒᜈ. Not a priority for me, as it's not that practical of a skill, I guess?

## Where do I stand right now?

I think it would be nice to write down what I can do now in regard to Tagalog.

• It is November 2025
• I've had 16 italki lessons
• I use the book Tagalog for beginners by Joi Barrios
• I am at lesson 4
• I can introduce myself, use simple verbs, sometimes I use the right focus of the verbs, I can recognize the vibe of meaning in structures often
• I watch the news sometimes; I do often catch the words I know
• I do not do well if I speak with someone who talks too fast
• I try to speak, but it takes a while, and I have a habit of trying to use complicated sentences and then I never go back if switch to English
• I try to do the Tagalog.com flashcards deck and Clozemaster everyday
• I have one italki lesson a week

### And what are my goals?

I want to try to speak more. And write more. I want to continue with the textbook and the flashcards. I am not doing the Tagalog.com 2k deck that diligently anymore, because it has so little verbs and nouns that I got bored. I entered the vocabulary from the textbook to Tagalog.com's system, which gave me about 1k words, so I want to focus on that more. I will do both decks, I think. I just want to learn more fun words. I want to try watching a Filipino TV show or something (I did actually watch a Filipino-Czech movie back in September 2025 and I did understand more than I was expecting, which was so cool).

I also want to keep managing and perfect my TiddlyWiki that I write in Czech. It is supposed to be, like, a Czech resource for Filipino language and perhaps mayhaps the culture. I tried looking up some Czech articles about Tagalog/Filipino and there is not much to find. It's usually Wikipedia copy+paste published by traveling agencies. It maybe is a bit silly, because a lot of Czechs speak English and a lot of Filipinos speak English, too. So perhaps there is not a need for anything like this... but, just because something is not needed doesn't mean it can't exist, right? It is fun to learn both something about Tagalog and also about how to work with TiddlyWiki. I also want to use the site to talk about some things that are related to both the Philippines and the Czech Republic. It's fun to learn so I would like to share. Although, I must admit, I feel like a crazy girlfriend. I hope I'm not that crazy. I hope I'm just cute.

#english #learning #tagalog