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How much Tagalog or Filipino should an expat know to visit or live in the Philippines?
mrsegovia
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How much Tagalog or Filipino should an expat know to visit or live in the Philippines?
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Foreign expats don’t really need to learn Tagalog in the Philippines and get along with people perfectly fine in English, at least in the cities. Anyway, Filipinos are taught the English language in school to a level in which they can speak it fluently and can say, use it in business or write endless novels. But expats can learn Tagalog is they want, that is their choice that they are more freely to make in the Philippines because many Filipinos can speak English and for those that come from outside Luzon can speak regional languages. Even further, thoae of mixed-race backgrounds can speak other languages like Spanish or Chinese. Tagalog is very complicated for an English speaker because Tagalog is agglutinative, meaning that speakers stack words and affixes upon each other to make a new word or just combine a phrase into one word. Also we have Austronesian alignment with 6 voices in Tagalog. Austronesian alignment is a kind of morphosyntactic alignment in which one argument can be marked as having a special relationship to the verb. They are marked in sentences using affixes to mark the case/voice trigger. Tagalogs have an agent, patient, locative, benefactive, instrument and reason trigger. That means that you have six ways to say an English sentence. Further, you have four types of aspect (complete, progressive, contemplative and recently complete), a flexible word order, a direct, indirect and oblique case and dozens of enclitic particles and modifiers. If you want to take Tagalog, sure, take the challenge. It is classified as a Category III language for English native speakers because of these features and the fact that it is in a totally different language family than English. Otherwise, if you want to live in the Philippines, you can get along fine with English, just that it would be beneficial also to learn Tagalog or any other Filipino language for your own wisdom.
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I think its always good to learn the local culture. But to get around English, is widely spoken so in ll truth you don’t need much as well as this if you are going some where out side Manila they have there own dialect.