Learning Tagalog

I just had my first formal lesson in Tagalog, with a dear lady named Ate Susing. She gave me a lot of good things to practice and learn. I can only afford both in time and in money one session per week, but I think I'll still do well. Next Friday it will be at the same time, 7-9 AM, then once other students who had that time slot return we'll arrange some other time, possibly 4-6 PM one day a week.

Ate Susing said she noticed right away that I was not going to have similar problems to some other Americans she has trained. In particular: Tagalog does not apsirate the "T," so it is made more with the lips and teeth without the explosion of breath typical of English. I told her that Hebrew has both an aspirated (Tet) and an unaspirated (Tav) T, so I understood that difference. In addition, the linker "nga" (and I'm not sure exactly what a linker is, yet) is a guttural sound made in the nose, if that makes sense. The guttural sound I can do from my knowledge of German, so I just threw the throaty Germanic noises into my nose and I was raring to go.

I can get along well here with English, since it's the official language of the seminary, but that seems to be cheating myself out of an essential piece of the experience here. Even though some of my students have told me that English (or, at least "Taglish) is spoken by the in-crowd/snobs here, I think learning Tagalog will help me very much. Maybe someday I'll even be able to do a blog post in Tagalog. Of course, I'll have to translate it into English right away, but it would be fun to be able to do it in the first place.