ME TALK TAGALOG ONE DAY
Something made me want to try something different this 2018, and I signed up for Berlitz lessons in Tagalog. I’m not sure why, exactly, but so far it’s been a radically different experience for me, like being dropped in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with just my shorts and T-shirt for cover and no Internet service.
My past efforts to commit to learning a few Tagalog phrases or words each day while living here soon stretched out to “each month,” then to “each year,” until, 20 odd years later, I remain humbly non-conversational. This doesn’t seem to bother some Filipinos, though others find it an opportunity to drill me and watch me stumble and fall on my feet. I once wrote about “Why Americans Fear Karaoke.” A companion piece might be “Why Americans Fear Having Random Tagalog Phrases Shot At Them.” It’s just one of my long-held terrors I’ve managed to duck for a long time; but eventually all of poetic compression, it seems.
A few minutes into our first session, M pulls back a bit on the Berlitz throttle — we are actually supposed to converse entirely in Tagalog, which in my case would be a very one-sided conversation indeed — and he helps me get through some of the usual questions foreigners come up with. Like, why certain words are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently (example: ba-KA = probably, while BA-ka = cow. So, “baka baka” means, um… “Cow, probably”?).
All this trivial info is at least stimulating, and certainly helps me write a column, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll emerge from all of this with any enhanced fluency. I do know that I emerged from my first Berlitz hour with a headache, and feeling very, very tired. The head of the center, a Filipina, asked me, on my way out, how it had gone. I gestured at my nostrils, drawing my fingers downward, the only gesture I could summon after 90 minutes of foreign language immersion, and used the expression I’d heard many Filipinos say after conversing with me in English: “Nosebleed na.”
She nodded her head and sort of smiled: “Now you know how we feel.”
DAY TWO
A week passes, and I forget everything I haven’t learned. No matter, M picks up with objects (bagay), the nature of which I struggle to interpret from his hand gestures. Lamesa means table, silya means chair, kuwarto means room, and pretty soon I want to make alis and go to an inuman (bar) and drink cerveza. I thank the Spanish for naming beer something that I can remember, like cerveza, instead of the many words I continually forget. (I at least manage to tuck away the phrase
“Isa pa” which means “One more,” which will be useful later in the inuman.)
M rattles through articles (ng, ay, si, ang, at, ni) that all seem interchangeable to me, and I tend to just reach for one out of