may quest ako.

a fil-can's tagalog learning journey. pfp + header bg credit: 8pxl.co

[mayquestako]

[mayquestako]

filed in: filipino songs that I've had on repeat in the past week

[mayquestako]

first post

It's been a month since I started tagalog lessons with a community tutor on italki. I feel like I've learned more in the past 4-5 weeks than I did in the past 29 years of failed attempts.

I clicked with the instructor that I picked for my first trial lesson so I immediately bought a lesson package. It's going splendid so far.

So far we've covered basic greetings, days of the week, telling the time, may as "there is" and "x has", mga as plurification, pronouns, at, sa + place, sa vs nung, ng + time…hanggang, ba in may questions, how to answer may questions, wala vs may, wala + pronouns.

I chose 30 minutes long lessons. At first I thought that might be too short but now I feel that it's just the right amount of time. We've gotten into a groove of <= 5 minutes of greeting, where every time I describe my day in English she'll give me one or two new vocabulary; 10-12 minutes review of last week's lesson; remaining 15-20 minutes of new vocab and grammar concept(s). Learning a whole ass new grammar concept in less than 30 minutes is actually pretty intense, and I know that if I had scheduled more than 30 minutes I'd be burnt out or my mind would start to wander. So this is good. I also work overtime consistently and attend class part-time, so 1 concept and a handful of vocab a week is just enough for me to absorb and actually retain the new information week over week at a manageable pace.

Meanwhile, whenever I have the time (which could possibly be never), I'd like to keep tabs of my learning journey here on this blog. Just a central peg-board where I can deposit random language or linguistics-related thoughts, OPM lyrics, etymologies I find interesting, resources I've found helpful, etc.

Maybe someone else will find it helpful one day? Who knows