LESSON 1 - Introduction Tagalog means “from the river” “taga” (where you’re from) “ilog” (river) and is the main language used. But we do have many dialects all over the country.

The basic structure of our sentence is the same as in English: Subject-Verb-Predicate. Example I am walking along the street. |Ako ay naglalakad sa kalsada. AKO (I am) – Subject AY NAGLALAKAD (walking) - Verb SA KALSADA (along the street) - Predicate

Our language is similar to how Japanese read their words. You read it as how it was written. Example “Su-ki” in Japanese means “Like”; In Tagalog it is “gus-to”.

But sometime there are words that are spelled the same. It would now differ in the intonation or how you pronounce it. Example BAKA ba-ka = cow ba-ka (the “ka” has a higher intonation) = maybe

BASA ba-sa = read ba-sa (the “sa” has a higher intonation) = wet

If you encounter the word “ng” – it is read as “nang” the “ng” sound is similar to “sing” and if you see “mga” – it is read as “ma-nga” and is used to make the nouns plural.