yes, I'm aware of the distinction now, but before I began studying it, I would have simply assumed that 'Filipino' is the singular native language of the Philippines. This is more a product of the way English constructs adjectives from country names. For example, many native English speakers might assume that 'Chinese' is therefore the singular native language of China. Do I make a distinction between Filipino and Tagalog now? In practical terms, not really. I initially found it frustrating that dictionaries refer me to deep tagalog words that many tagalogs don't know or find confusing, leading to them switching to English to ask what i'm saying.... to which they reply 'we just say 'sandwich' or 'Movie' or 'railroad' etc... So to me, it seems almost impossible to learn Filipino without studying Tagalog, and conversely, it's impossible to learn just Tagalog without ending up speaking Filipino, or Taglish. Now I'm pretty relaxed about it. It seems to me that the whole language group is ideally suited to word borrowing so to try and box it in to 'Pure Tagalog' might be an impossible and redundant task.

It's a weird situation because Filipino (the national language) is technically a constructed language based on Tagalog, which the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino regulates and insists is more than just Tagalog with extra words from English, Spanish, and local languages/dialects. In practice, I haven't really seen that much of a difference between Filipino and Tagalog, to the point where I don't think they're even different at all. When you see articles pushing back against the new K-12 program, their main concern is often that abandoning Filipino (which is still essentially Tagalog) as the medium of classroom instruction weakens the national character, but I don't buy that argument. If anything, the long-standing emphasis on Tagalog-only education and media hurts local cultures and promotes discrimination in schools and in the professional sector as well. While it's great that Tagalog can be used to communicate throughout the country, trying to legislate it into a position of linguistic superiority over local languages is problematic in a lot of ways.

Absolutely yes. Any Filipino podcasts I've listened to explain the usages of Tagalog, English and Spanish phrases in modern Filipino quite clearly. Really, it's quite impressive. :D

Tagalog is the National language of the Philippines, but each community has its own dialect. I have observed some Filipinos using English to communicate with each other when certain words do not translate. Its much like the formal Spanish language that is used in Spain but not understood in other Spanish speaking countries. Even Americans have difficulty understanding people from England at times.