Tagalog words slip by me like bullets in ‘The Matrix’: easy to duck and hard to connect with.

chickens come home to roost and, well, you know, you’ve got learn to talk turkey. (Oh, those fowl metaphors!)

DAY ONE

I meet my instructor (I will call him M) in a small room with a whiteboard facing across from me. We are alone. There is nowhere to hide.

M wants to figure out how much I know — or rather, how much I don’t know. This takes surprisingly little time. I have spent 22 years here, and know nothing. Tagalog words slip by me like bullets in The Matrix: easy to duck and hard to connect with.

A few interesting takeaways from my first lesson:

• Tagalog expresses a lot in quantities, as well as opposites. One of my first-encountered words, “na,” means “already” but can express both “too much” as well as “not enough.” (As in “After Lesson One, my brain is dead na.”)

• Filipinos, as I’ve learned, do not like to confront people head-on with criticisms. Behind the back is preferred, but if you need to offer an opinion on, say, the questionable looks of some person, you might try qualifying it with “pero” (“but”), which kind of lessens the blow. Like, if pressed about Betsy’s features, you might hedge and say “Eh, hindi maganda (Um… not beautiful…), then talk about some other quality she possesses: “Pero,

maganda ang kanyang ugali.” (She has a nice personality.) The pero actually gives you breathing space to think of something nice to say. How clever. How evasive.

• The word bakla came up, and I surmised that it was born during the Flower Power generation of the ‘60s here, as an informal term (close to “bulaklak”?). But bakla is probably preferable to an earlier term for homosexual promoted by priests and the Catholic Church — binatababae — which translates roughly to “No-spouse male.” So bachelors and lone males were highly suspect in the Catholic-heavy Philippines.

• I always assumed “kano” was a shortened form of “Amerikano,” but it also refers to the hair that grows freely on the arms of Europeans, Australians, Canadians and us Americans. A lot of language does double duty here. Puns are a form desperation and toss it among my string of random Tagalog words. But slowly, I see the fog start to lift: I begin to see how one word is correct, another is not.

Then the fog descends again — usually when M asks me a question in Tagalog, and I attempt to parse its meaning in slow motion, like a very, very stoned surfer dude trying to get through his SATs.

There is that occasional magic moment where I suddenly “get” something — when I successfully manage to describe my shirt’s colors (“Ang polo shirt ko ay

asul at pula”) by simply doing a Mad Libs rewrite of the sentence structure he’s just written on the whiteboard — and I am absurdly proud of myself; I’m actually beaming like the village idiot. At least it feels like progress. After that, I’m ready to call it a day. But there’s more. We go through a whole page of opposites (mga kabaligtaran) that really demonstrates how little vocab I actually possess in my storehouse. If words were acorns, and I were a starving squirrel in cold November, I would surely perish within a week, 10 days tops. But still. We get through it. I don’t know if I’m simply cramming a bunch of stuff in a bag that’s got a hole in it, and these words will just dribble out and away from me forever as I move on in life. But I’m determined to persist. At least for the remaining eight sessions.

There’s a weird feeling of hope, too, as I begin to crack some of this Tagalog stuff, but I’m careful to manage my expectations. One of the saddest short stories I ever read was “Flowers for Algernon,” which was made into an Oscar-winning movie with Cliff Robertson called Charly. In it, a slow-witted janitor is part of a lab experiment, given a new drug that boosts his IQ dramatically — suddenly he’s, like, totally smart, and can even understand the universe and everything. We’re so proud of Charly, and his newly discovered capacity to dream. Then, the story cruelly shows how the experimental drug wears off, and reverses its effects; Charly goes back to being a slow-witted janitor again, and gradually forgets how smart he used to be.

I am the janitor in this analogy.