maligayang buwan ng wika!! nag-aaral pa lang ako ng tagalog pero mahal ko siya at gusto kong sabihin ang mga dahilan ko (pero sa ingles kasi hindi ko pa kayang gamitin ang mas malaking salita)
english translation: happy language month!! i'm still only learning tagalog but i love it and i want to talk about my reasons (but in english because i can't use the bigger words yet)
gender neutral!!!! the only third person singular pronoun is "siya" which applies to he or she or they (singular) or it in some contexts (like i did above) and it's nice not thinking about it
i love po and ba. i find myself in other languages accidentally saying po because i want to be respectful on instinct and it's a very good way of indicating it. i'm the same way for ba but for interrogative sentences
the words feel so much stronger than english. my less serious example for this is always something like utot vs fart or pwet vs butt or panget vs ugly, but also others like malambot or ipit or bukol feel so much more. you can practically feel it.
muta. oh my god why isn't there an english word for muta
araw means both sun and day because they share the same cycle and buwan is moon and month for the same reason and i think that's really cool
i'm currently learning spanish as well and every time i come across some tagalog word that came from spanish i think it's really cool. it also makes me appreciate tagalog a lot more because every word in tagalog is spelled very consistently with how it's pronounced (eg: cinco vs singko. the spanish word has two different ways of pronouncing a C vs tagalog)
shifting focuses!!! example: "nanood ako ng tv" and "pinanood ko ang tv" mean the same thing in english. they both mean i watched tv but they have slightly different meanings because of the emphasis shifting from the subject to the object. it can be hard to get used to but i think it's cool that it's slightly different
speaking of verbs i am so happy we don't conjugate for each pronoun. once again i'm learning spanish and i have to learn both the way it conjugates for the pronoun and tense. the flip side of this is that there are all the different ways to conjugate for each focus of the sentence but the rules are pretty consistent per verb affix which i appreciate
