Learning Tagalog from scratch

[untrucdeouf]

Week 1: April 21-27 (working on a Friday-Thursday week schedule)

I only recently found my way to this forum but really like the idea of documenting my progress on a regular basis!

I've come to Tagalog with essentially no knowledge of the language, other than a few greetings and scattered words. I live in Canada, in a city where there are many Tagalog speakers. I've wanted to start learning the language for years and I've made some extremely brief abortive attempts in the past but nothing stuck. 10 years ago it was very difficult for me to find Tagalog language learning resources, but the situation has definitely improved since I gave up on Pimsleur years ago (I know Pimsleur works well for many people, but I really need to be able to see words written down in order to be able to remember them!) Ultimately my goal is to become conversational.

Hours logged this week: 15

Grammar: This week I started working through the Language Crush Tagalog Lite free courses, and finished lessons 1-6. I know I'll need quite a bit of review to make the grammar stick long-term. I needed to do quite a bit of Googling to understand that 'ang', 'ng' and 'sa' are actually case markers, and I ended up doing an accidental dive into the difference between nominative-accusative languages and ergative-absolutive languages (a distinction I was previously unaware of). But I think it actually was time well-spent -- it recalibrated my expectations around how subjects and direct objects are 'supposed' to behave in sentences.

Pronunciation: I've started using Glossika's Tagalog course to work on my pronunciation and learn common phrases. Once thing I noticed right away is that the k in 'ako' in the recordings is softened a lot and is closer to /x/. Apparently this is a thing when 'k' appears intervocally. However I really feel like I've heard it pronounced with a much stronger /k/ in other settings! I'm going to check in with some native speakers when I have a chance.

Vocabulary: I'm using the English for Tagalog speakers Duolingo course whenever I have some casual downtime, or feel like I'm not up to focused study -- it's not going to be what I spend most of my time on, but I think it's going to be good for vocabulary reinforcement and remembering where to place enclitics. Ulangi is my app of choice for vocab flashcards, and I think over the next couple weeks I'm really going to focus on Tagalog roots. I think it's going to be the most bang for my buck, since I'm already seeing how useful it is to be able to infer the meanings of words from their roots.

Listening: I began watching 'Trese' on Netflix (with Filipino audio and English subtitles). It's only 6 episodes long, and I'm planning to watch the whole series multiple times over the next few weeks. I'm also hoping to try to learn the lyrics of one Tagalog song each week (even if it's mainly just phonetic at first). I'm a 90s kid and was thrilled to discover some alt-rock/grunge bands like Eraserheads, so I'll probably dive into their discography. This week, though, I spent a lot of time listening to Freddie Aguilar's "Estudyante Blues", which is a fun song and has lots of beginner-friendly vocabulary.

I know I won't have as much free time next week since it's going to be much busier at work, but I feel like I've made a decent start already and hope to keep the momentum up!

[untrucdeouf]

I had a feeling this past week was going to be challenging for language learning, and it sure was. I ended up working close to 70 hours, and any study time had to be squeezed in around the edges of everything else. I knew I wasn't at my most fresh and focused so I spent most of my time on Duolingo and drilling vocabulary -- I didn't really have the mental space to grapple with grammar. I'm looking forward to the week ahead and to finally getting some rest so I feel more prepared to dig into some thornier concepts like verb focuses.

Week 2: April 28 - May 4

Hours logged this week: 8
Total hours: 23

Song of the week: Liwanag sa Dilim - Rivermaya

Word of the week: 'barkada' (n.), meaning 'a group of friends' or 'a gang of friends'. Derives from the Spanish word barcada, meaning 'boatload'. I really like the imagery!

Grammar: I did a short review of Language Crush Tagalog Lite Lesson 4 (unaffixed adjectives) but nothing else specific. I spent more time than I normally would on Duolingo because it was an easy thing to jump on during short breaks in my schedule. I'm being careful to note that most of the Tagalog sentences in the Duolingo English for Tagalog speakers course use the 'ay' inverted form -- cursory Googling suggests that while these sentences might be accurate, a lot of them come off as unnatural or overly formal. (I think the course is structured this way so that English learners can get a handle on S-V-O sentence structure.) Ultimately I think it's still good practice to learn this form given that the other materials I'm working with really emphasize V-S-O word order anyway.

Pronunciation: About 300 Glossika reps. I did ask a native speaker about the intervocal 'k' -- when I asked them to pronounce the word 'ako' in isolation, they used a hard 'k'. But when I played them the recordings with the /x/ sound, they said that that pronunciation actually sounded more natural and is probably how they'd pronounce the word if speaking quickly. So I probably should put some time into learning it! It's not coming easily.

Vocabulary: Lots of Ulangi drills, mostly roots.

Listening: Nothing specific, other than the song of the week, which I really enjoyed. I'm a total sucker for inspirational mid-00's anthems.

[untrucdeouf]

Week 3: May 5 - May 11

Bit of a late summation this week. I’ve been continuing to really focus on memorizing root words, and I’m delighted every time I’m able to correctly guess the meaning of a new word I’ve encountered based on its root. (In this respect, I feel like there are a lot of parallels between my approach to learning Tagalog and my past brief efforts at learning Esperanto!)

Learning root words has also already helped me correct some mistakes. One glaring one: A couple weeks ago, I’d entered the vocabulary from Freddie Aguilar’s “Estudyante Blues” into my vocab app, and dutifully recorded the meaning of “paggaling” as ‘getting better, improving’, based on the definition in the Tagalog online dictionary I’m using. I assumed that in context, “paggaling sa eskuwela”, meant ‘getting better’ at school, i.e. improving as a student. Made sense to me!

But then I encountered the root word ‘galing’, which has a secondary meaning of ‘coming from’. And then realized that the line “paggaling sa eskuwela/deretso na ng bahay” obviously actually refers to coming (home) from school. Especially since it’s clearly meant to contrast with the first verse, where the narrator is listening to a lecture at the breakfast table before “pumasok sa eskuwela”. I’m pretty pleased to have worked that one out.

This week I also encountered Tadbalik/Baliktad Tagalog via Eraserhead’s “Bogchi Hokbu”. The song was initially totally confounding to me until I looked up the lyrics and a blogger (thankfully!) explained that they were written in a form of Tagalog “pig Latin” that reverses syllables — although actually I think it’s morphologically closer to French verlan than pig Latin. I’m counting this as my song of the week despite the fact that it doesn’t contain any standard Tagalog words (I still added the words in their un-reversed forms into Ulangi). I went down a real rabbit hole on this, and I feel like it paid off because I was almost immediately able to recognize another example of it in the wild: the title of Bamboo’s song “Noypi”.

I also was really focused on finding content this week. I ordered five Tagalog books:
- Toto O., by Charmaine Lasar
- Ang Pag-Ikot ng Salapi sa Panahon ni JLC, by Andrian Legaspi
- Ambil, by E. San Juan, Jr.
- Saanman, by Jack A. Alvarez
- Layag: European Classics in Filipino, trans. Jaroslav Olša Jr.

I’m especially excited about the latter book, since the collection features a number of European authors I’m not familar with at all. I’m hoping to be able to find good English translations of all the collected stories. I also spent some time trying to find a bunch of OPM songs on Spotify that I like enough to listen to a hundred times on repeat. Goes without saying I guess, but I’m so much more likely to be motivated to study if I have access to good content that I’m looking forward to engaging with.

Hours logged this week: 9
Total hours: 32

Song of the week: Bogchi Hokbu - Eraserheads

Word of the week: ‘kudeta’ (n.), meaning ‘coup d’état’ (a straight borrowing from the French — the pronunciation is nearly identical).

Grammar: No textbook work this past week, but I did some reading up on grammatical points that I was finding confusing, specifically the difference between ‘saan’ and ‘nasaan’, trying to get a better handle on verb conjugations, and trying to work out whether or not Tagalog is a pro-drop language. I feel like I’ve got a reasonable grasp of ‘saan’ and ’nasaan’ now, but understanding how verbs conjugate is definitely going to be an extremely long-term project, since it's so different from English — as well as any other language I’ve tried to learn in the past. As to the pro-drop question, after spending some time looking into it, I actually came away way more confused than when I began (especially after running across linguists arguing that Tagalog doesn’t actually have pronouns). So I have shelved the question for the time being. Something to come back to later on when I don’t feel so out of my depth.

Pronunciation: A little bit of Glossika, a lot of singing along with 90s OPM songs.

Vocabulary: Still doing a lot of Ulangi drills with a heavy focus on roots. I’ve also started “reading” Toto O. (i.e. looking up every third word in a dictionary) and entering in new vocabulary from that.

Listening: Music obviously, but also a totally ridiculous ‘audiobook’ from Vocabulearn that’s just basically a word list. Can’t recommend it at all, but I’ve been listening to it when I’m working around the house. It’s been good for reinforcing stress placement.

[crush]

Mabuhay! Looks like you're making great progress! The Filipino verb conjugations seem really complex and weird at first, but they quickly make sense. Verbs only have 4 forms (and don't conjugate based on the subject, just on the tense/aspect). The hardest part in my opinion is figuring out how the various affixes work and when to use which. Sometimes it just feels random to me!

I can also highly recommend LearningTagalog.com, that's the course i started with and it's pretty similar to an Assimil course, if you've ever used Assimil. Tagalog.com is great as well, they have a reader (tagalogreader.com) which is amazing for reading ebooks. They also have songs with lyrics (that you can use with their pop-up dictionary), a few news podcasts each week with transcriptions and English translation, Youtube videos with transcriptions, and much more. I imported the Language Crush Tagalog conversations to the reader there for my initial foray into reading. It's a super useful tool, definitely check it out if you're big on reading! Also, i've mostly read Wattpad novels, not sure if you're familiar with it, but it has a huge Filipino community and thousands upon thousands of stories written in Tagalog. Quality varies and many of them aren't very well proofread unfortunately, but you do come across some interesting stories from time to time.

[untrucdeouf]

Reporting back after a very inconsistent month. I knew that I was going to be totally slammed at work from mid-May to the end of June, and after a few 14-hour work days, I decided to totally take the pressure off of myself by giving myself a break on sit-down studying and time tracking. I can't really estimate how many hours I've spent on Tagalog in the last month, so I won't even bother to try! I've still been engaging with the language fairly regularly -- vocabulary reviews, YouTube grammar videos, listening to music, etc. but not working in any kind of "serious" structured way.

Thankfully the summer is shaping up to be a lot slower, and I'm going restart the time tracking, because when I have the bandwidth for it, I find it to be useful to be able to reflect on where I'm spending my time and how I can use it best.

One development from the past month is that my Filipino colleagues have proven to be very encouraging and supportive of my language learning attempts, and have been regularly (and patiently) engaging me in the language -- despite my extremely rudimentary abilities. This has helped keep my motivation up, and means that I'm actively using the language most days, even if it's just to say magandang umaga and kamusta ka. I'm also finding I'm starting to be able to understand small scraps of Tagalog conversations while out in the world. (I was recently very pleased with myself for understanding a woman behind me in line who was telling her toddler to "sandali!")

I also had my first lesson with an online tutor last Sunday, which went really well. I'm hoping to be able to pick up the language-learning pace again starting this weekend!

[untrucdeouf]

Mabuhay! Looks like you're making great progress! The Filipino verb conjugations seem really complex and weird at first, but they quickly make sense. Verbs only have 4 forms (and don't conjugate based on the subject, just on the tense/aspect). The hardest part in my opinion is figuring out how the various affixes work and when to use which. Sometimes it just feels random to me!

I can also highly recommend LearningTagalog.com, that's the course i started with and it's pretty similar to an Assimil course, if you've ever used Assimil. Tagalog.com is great as well, they have a reader (tagalogreader.com) which is amazing for reading ebooks. They also have songs with lyrics (that you can use with their pop-up dictionary), a few news podcasts each week with transcriptions and English translation, Youtube videos with transcriptions, and much more. I imported the Language Crush Tagalog conversations to the reader there for my initial foray into reading. It's a super useful tool, definitely check it out if you're big on reading! Also, i've mostly read Wattpad novels, not sure if you're familiar with it, but it has a huge Filipino community and thousands upon thousands of stories written in Tagalog. Quality varies and many of them aren't very well proofread unfortunately, but you do come across some interesting stories from time to time.

Thanks so much for the encouragement and the recommendations! I didn't know that Wattpad had such a large Filipino community. I'm still struggling with finding reading material, so that looks like a great avenue to pursue.

[untrucdeouf]

After perusing the thoughtful answers on this thread: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=19226 ("Has anyone ever tracked the precise number of hours to learn a language from start to finish?"), I've decided to give up on the idea of precise time tracking for the time being. I might pick it back up if I find my motivation flagging, but I was persuaded by the posters that argued that it doesn't provide particularly useful (or replicable) data, and I'm already at the stage with Tagalog where I'm engaging with the language a lot outside of sit-down study. I've realized I don't actually want to bother tracking the time I spend listening to music or watching YouTube.

Since my last post, I've had a few more online lessons. I'm currently doing one lesson a week with three different tutors. They have diverse tutoring styles and come from different parts of the Philippines, and I think working with multiple people exposes me to different perspectives and teaching techniques.

I'm starting rdearman's 30-30 vocabulary challenge today, which I'm pretty amped about. Unfortunately it seems like the Ulangi server is down today -- which is not exactly optimal since it's my primary tool for vocabulary study! But so far I've added a bunch of sentences to Clozemaster (about three per word). I'm culling sentences from the Clozemaster corpus when available, but also using tagaloglang.com, tagalog.com, and Glosbe to find sample sentences with the words in context. I'm definitely planning to play around with different vocabulary acquisition strategies and see what I find to be most effective by month end.

The parameters I've set for myself for this challenge are:
1) Cognates are fine to include in the challenge if they aren't too painfully obvious (ex. 'keyk' would be fine to add to my challenge list, since I wouldn't necessarily assume that it meant 'cake' if I saw it out of context as a standalone word)
2) Words that include roots I already know are fine if, again, the meaning isn't immediately obvious. So I probably wouldn't include something like 'magbayad' since I already know the root word 'bayad', but 'tag-araw' (meaning 'summer') would be fair game, since the meaning isn't immediately clear to me just because I know the root word 'araw'.
3) All verbs will be added in their infinitive forms and conjugations won't count as separate list items.

We'll see how many of the 900 words I manage to retain by month end. I'm aiming for 700+, but we'll see how the month goes.

Here's my spreadsheet of challenge items if anyone feels like checking it out:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mjqfy3gWtphkh-VreNJrLrWsLbcuA7YsdUgVLiZfwZs/edit?usp=sharing

[untrucdeouf]

Three days in and I'm still really enjoying the vocab challenge. 30 new words per day feels like a totally manageable amount in Tagalog. So far I've been acing my end-of-day tests, but I'm not sure that will continue to be the case as the words begin to pile up.

I'd actually played around with the idea of doing a double challenge by adding another 30 words per day in French, but quickly realized how unmanageable it was going to get and unceremoniously dropped that plan. I'm still doing my usual leisure French reading/listening (nearly done with a French translation of Through the Looking-Glass, which I've always thought was the better of the Alice books) but skipping any structured vocab practice.

However, I'm feeling a little crushed by what I'm afraid is the possible death of Ulangi. The Github repository has been archived, the website is down, and sync/login is no longer working. I'm not sure there's going to be a simple way to pull all my data out, and between French and Tagalog, I've got thousands of words stored in the app. I'm crossing my fingers that this is a temporary outage, but three days of radio silence seems to be a bad sign. I always found Ulangi such a pleasure to use. It's purpose-made for language learning, couldn't be simpler to use, has a well-implemented hint system, and I like that every flashcard has two testing styles (spaced repetition and writing). I'm not sure I have the mental fortitude to return to Anki. This may sound shallow but I really like Ulangi's UI -- it looks slick, simple, and modern to me -- and I can't stand the appearance of the Anki interface. Realistically, I'm just much less likely to use a tool if the experience doesn't feel pleasant.

But doing a vocab challenge without the aid of an SRS app is not a great situation! So I'm probably going to have to find an alternative.

On the positive side, I had a great Tagalog lesson yesterday. It definitely was the most speaking I've done in the language so far. Made plenty of rookie mistakes but that's to be expected.

Had to make a three hour drive yesterday and listened to OPM Tagalog music the whole way. I've been on a major zild & Rico Blanco kick.

I've also discovered that the CBC/Radio-Canada's international arm publishes between 2-10 articles a day in Tagalog. They're typically translations of major news stories or items of interest to the Filipino community. I've been hungry for reading material and this is a treasure trove. It's especially useful because I'm usually already familiar with the topics from reading English/French news, and the original English version of each article is always available for reference (linked at the bottom of each article).

[untrucdeouf]

I think it's safe to say that the current version of Ulangi is officially deprecated. I'm disappointed but moving on. I spent a lot of time this past week customizing Anki cards so they look reasonably pleasant. I think the time investment has paid off because I'm no longer as irritated by the interface. But I still really miss a lot of the Ulangi features that were specific to language learning that are missing from Anki!

Most of my time has been spent on the 30:30 vocab challenge this month, and I'm finding it's helped a lot with respect to my reading comprehension. But I think I've been somewhat shortchanging my grammar study and listening practice as a result. I'm going to do my best over the next couple weeks to carve out more time for that.

I'm currently doing two Preply lessons per week and I think I'm going to continue on with that for the foreseeable future. It's been good for my motivation, since I want to show that I'm making progress in each subsequent lesson. I also really need the push to speak as much as possible, because I want to avoid fossilizing the syllable stress mistakes I seem to frequently be internalizing when reading. It's nice to have a tutor correct me when I say maramíng instead of maráming. Recently I've started setting up all my new flashcards in Anki to require typed input, and I've included all the stress marks in the Tagalog words. I've been failing cards if I enter the stress marks incorrectly and then saying the words out loud when I get the stress wrong. I'm hoping this will help.

Other than issues with syllable stress, I think my most common mistake right now is saying 'hindi' when I should actually say 'wala', so I'm going to do a bunch of practice on the difference between those two words this week.

[untrucdeouf]

This is less of a Tagalog progress update and more of an Anki customization/meta-language learning update: I think I've now managed to mostly recreate the major features of Ulangi I was missing thanks to the Anki documentation and the lovely people of Stack Overflow, and I'm feeling very pleased with myself. Really wish I had managed to accomplish this at the start of the 30-30 vocabulary challenge, but better late than never, I suppose!

It may seem like I've been complaining primarily about cosmetic issues between Anki and Ulangi, but I've used Ulangi for multiple years and I found this month that my vocabulary study was far less effective using Anki in its default state compared to Ulangi. I was actually shocked by how many extra repetitions it was taking for me to learn a card. I definitely went into this switch with a general feeling that the default Anki setup might be less effective for me, but I really didn't think the difference would be anywhere near as substantial as it turned out to be. After using Anki's standard type box setup for a couple of weeks now, I have a few hypotheses as to why the software hasn't been as effective for me for vocabulary retention:

1) Ulangi provides in-the-moment feedback when you're entering text. So you know immediately when you have entered a wrong letter and you have the opportunity to correct your mistake right away.

IMG_0684.jpg

IMG_0683.jpg

I find that this forced error-correcting mechanism means I'm much more likely to get the word right the next time. This seems to work really well for me personally, but it probably also generalizes since I know there are also a number of studies that suggest that making errors, as long as they are immediately followed by an accurate correction, can improve retention.

ex. An excerpt from the abstract of this recent study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9345471/

"Our results support the use of learning strategies that engage in active and explicit retrieval because, even if the retrieved information is wrong—when immediate feedback is provided—memory updating is promoted and errors are more likely to be corrected.")

2) In writing mode, Ulangi forces you to type in the correct answer before you can move on to the next word, whereas Anki's textbox has you type in the word, press 'enter', and then it shows you the correct answer (and where you went wrong). I think not being forced to type out the correct answer when I got a word wrong was really damaging my retention. I found I was having to see an individual card over and over again before I actually remembered it.

3) I think the Ulangi hint system is great. Every time you press the 'Show' button, it shows you more of the word. So if the word is 'pagkatapos', the first press will show you 'p...', the second press will display 'pag...', the third press will display 'pagka...', etc. etc. I have no studies to back this up, but I found that if I was able to correctly enter the word after seeing just the first letter or first few letters, I was also more likely to get it entirely right the next time (compared to the Anki default behaviour of entering nothing in the textbox when you can't think of the word at all, and just checking the right answer). I should note that I always fail cards if I am only able to get them right with the aid of a hint.

So over the last week I've tried to rebuild these features for myself in Anki, with quite a bit of aid from other people's JS code.

Incorrect letter entry turns the font colour red:

Screenshot 2023-07-21 at 10.53.23 AM.png

Behaviour after pressing the hint button twice (second of three possible hint displays):

Screenshot 2023-07-21 at 12.08.34 PM.png

It's not perfect yet, but it's proven to be a pretty good interim solution. The text in the type box turns red if I enter an incorrect letter, allowing me to error-correct in the moment. The 'Show Hint' button is a total caveman solution right now: I've created three individual hint fields for each card with the word broken up into three hints, the last one being the whole word. I don't think there's a simple way to constrain the text box to not actually show the reverse side of the card until the full correct answer has been entered, but it's easy enough to just do that as a user behaviour. So if I don't know the word at all, I press the 'Show Hint' button three times to reveal the whole word, and then type it into the box myself before hitting the enter key to flip the card.

Hint button pressed three times to reveal the correct answer, which I then copied into the text box:

Screenshot 2023-07-21 at 10.52.53 AM.png

What I want to do eventually is to set it up so I'm not manually creating these hints (although it actually doesn't take that long) and instead have the hint button show incrementally longer substrings of the word until the word is complete. I'm not a coder -- I took exactly one Python course when I was in university -- so I'm going to have to mess around a bit with JS to accomplish this in a bug-free way since every potential answer is a variable-length string.

My retention already seems to be improving -- and I'm also just having a much more pleasant and less frustrating time with the software, the effects of which can't be underestimated! I'm going to keep tinkering with this to optimize it over time, but I'm happy for now.