About Talk Tagalog
Congratulations for making it on my website. Welcome to Talk Tagalog, the website where you can learn modern, colloquial Tagalog the natural way.
Of the four major language skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing – in my opinion, the most import one one needs to function like a real live human being in the Tagalog language or any foreign language is listening comprehension. That’s why I focus on listening comprehension on this website. I know what it’s like listening to a foreign language spoken at conversational speed where sounds to you like an incomprehensible mash of sounds. Tagalog especially can be a challenging language to get used to comprehending, where the simplest of root words are rendered beyond recognition with layers of prefixes, suffixes and repeated syllables hurled at you machine gun speed.
Hey, don’t beat yourself up if you can’t understand spoken Tagalog. Even though I speak Tagalog at a native level, whenever I transcribe a video in Tagalog I sometimes have to go through several times just to be sure I transcribe it exactly how it was spoken. “Exactly what did he just say?”. Tagalog, as you may know is spoken very fast.
Why I made Talk Tagalog
While the world wide web is swimming in free foreign language learning material for languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and French and the other usual suspects, I get so frustrated when I try learning less commonly studied languages like Hindi, Swahili, Sichuanese Mandarin, Hookien and other less commonly taught languages. Some of these less commonly studied languages have millions of speakers. The Philippines has over a hundred million people, almost all of whom can speak Tagalog. Aside from the people actually living in the country, there are an estimate around 12 million Filipinos living and working overseas. And millions people of Filipino descent living overseas in countries like the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Most people who try seriously pursuing these less commonly studied languages give up after finding out there aren’t many online resources for them. For less commonly learned languages like Tagalog, one quickly finds out there are very few quality websites sites, if any at all, which show real passion to teach the language as it is spoken in an everyday setting by real live human beings. So I decided to make the internet a better place by coming up with this site for one less commonly studied language which I do know – Tagalog.