daan

There are a lot of different ways to learn a language, and everybody has a different learning style. But the conventional advice nowadays usually goes something like this: if you want to learn a language, just start speaking. Immerse yourself. Don't obsess over grammar. Don't sit around memorising rules. Just get out there and talk.

That's almost the exact opposite of how many of us learned languages in school. I remember learning Spanish as a kid, sitting in a classroom being taught predicates and adverbs and conjugation tables. And I remember thinking: I'm not even sure I could tell you what an adverb is in English. For the record, I didn't learn Spanish. I've forgotten basically all of it. Meanwhile I'm obviously fluent in English, and I never studied a word of English grammar before I started speaking it.

So just start speaking makes intuitive sense. But the more I've tried to learn Tagalog, the less I completely agree with it. If you know almost nothing and somebody tells you to just start speaking, it is overwhelming in Tagalog. You hit a root, then an affix, then another affix, then something inserted into the middle of the word. You learn ma- one day as part of a verb and meet another ma- somewhere else doing a completely different job in an adjective. And none of it matters much if you don't know what the root words mean in the first place.

Which is why I've come around to something incredibly boring and old-fashioned: flashcards. Start by learning the root words. A lot of them. 1,500 to be specific. Then around 500 more nouns and 250 more adjectives. There is research behind this, at least for English — the two thousand most frequent word families cover something like 96% of casual spoken conversation. I've found the same in Tagalog. It wasn't until I could easily recognise around 2,000 words that I started being able to read almost any work WhatsApp message, pick things up listening in on a conversation, or say simple things myself. In short, you don't need everything. But to just start speaking, you do need a baseline foundation and a starting point.

However, as we all know, a house is much more than a foundation. In language learning, if knowing root words is the foundation, then speaking is the walls, the rooms, the roof, the furniture and everything else.

Here's an example of why. Last night I was out getting coffee with friends in Davao. They were speaking a mixture of Bisaya and Tagalog, and most of it was moving far too fast. But every so often I'd pick up on a word I knew. Ngiti — okay, something about a smile. Tawa — something about laughing. Punta — somebody is going somewhere, went somewhere, or will go somewhere. Then, unmistakably: “TagTalk app.” And the word ganda. Woohoo! They're saying something nice about it.

Eventually everyone started playing with the TagTalk flashcards, testing themselves on the Tagalog vocabulary.

The card for blue came up. They guessed asul, which is correct — but the answer the card wanted was bughaw. “Wait — that's not the word for blue,” And I said: “Bughaw is the older, deeper Tagalog word. Asul came from Spanish azul, and in everyday modern conversation plenty of people would just say blue anyway.” As a reminder, I was the guy who couldn't follow their actual Tagalog conversation five minutes earlier, ha.

This happened more than once. A few cards later it said road or pathway, a way forward, and nobody had it. “Daan,” I said. Correct. They looked at me. “How did you know that?” Well… because I studied it. A lot. A thousand TagTalk tala worth, at least.

Comical as that might be, this illustrates the difference between knowing a word and speaking a language. I could barely understand the Tagalog happening around me, but I was getting Tagalog flashcards right while people who actually speak the language were getting them wrong.

Here's why. Imagine I show you a flashcard in English: the passageway between buildings that you drive on. What's the word? Street? No. Road? No. Path? No. Driveway? No. Expressway? Highway? Freeway? Roadway? No, no and no. Then somebody who has spent six weeks memorising an English word list says alleyway — and you think, alleyway! Of course you know that word. You're fluent. But you weren't running down a list and checking each entry against a dictionary or a thesaurus, because that is not how you use English. You know what an alleyway is. You know when to use alleyway and when not to, and when you need it, it comes to you like magic.

That's the difference between words and definitions, and when words become concepts.

Flashcards get you the first. Speaking gets you the second.

So you need both flashcards and speaking, at different stages and in different proportions. Study enough that you have something to work with. Then go and use it. And somewhere along the way, the translation quietly disappears. Daan stops meaning road. It just means daan.

P.S. In 2015 a New Zealander named Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championship. He spent nine weeks memorising the French dictionary. He does not speak French. Similar competitors have emerged in English Scrabble too, with English their second or third language — Thai players have reached and won world finals, and one argument is that not speaking the language actually helps, because the words stop being words and become pure letter strings. It just goes to show that you can know an enormous number of words without knowing the language. For sure, you need the words before you can speak. But the goal isn't to memorise them for what they are. It's to learn them well enough to use them, until you forget you ever had to.

Daan is not road. Daan is a concept that English needs five or six words to cover.

Start with what it actually covers. Same root word, different meanings or experiences, exactly like the difference between a path through a park and a path to success.

• Ang daan ay makitid.The road is narrow.
• Walang daan papunta doon.There's no way to get there.
• Anong daan ang ginamit mo?Which route did you take?
• Dumaan ako sa palengke.I passed by the market.

And then it grows a family. For a method specifically you'd reach for paraan — Anong paraan ang ginamit mo? Which is the root-first idea from a few days back: learn daan properly and a whole set of words arrives with it.

• daanana passageway, or to pass by something
• dumaanto pass by, to go through
• paraana means, a method, a way of doing it
• nakaraanthe past — what has passed

Nakaraan is my favourite from the above. The Tagalog word for the past is built out of the word for a road: the past is what you have already walked through. That is beautiful. Also, there is no flashcard that gets you that.

Circle back to that flashcard asking for the colour blue. Why does Spanish stick forever in some places, while in others the Tagalog held its ground — and why is English now winning a few of them back? Bughaw lost to asul, and these days asul is quietly losing to blue. I wanted to know why.

Some of it is obvious. The word arrives with the thing. Spanish-style cutlery arrived as a new category rather than a replacement, so kutsara and tinidor walked in unopposed. Same with internet and online four hundred years later. Linguists have actually measured this across dozens of languages: the household, clothing, religion and law are among the most borrowed areas of vocabulary anywhere in the world. Things that arrive on a ship travel with their names attached.

But colours existed before Spain did. So did time. And look at how a Filipino says one in the afternoon: ala una ng hapon. The hour is Spanish. The part of the day is not — hapon is inherited, from an old Philippine word for birds coming in to roost at dusk. Filipinos always had morning, afternoon and evening, and those words never budged. What Spain brought wasn't time. It was the clock, the numbered hour, and the numbered hour came with Spanish numbers on it. The new system and the old experience are sitting in the same four-word phrase.

Which makes colour the strange one. That same survey found the least-borrowed area of vocabulary in the world is sense perception — seeing, hearing, tasting. Roughly a tenth as borrowable as the household. Colour words are among the things languages hold on to hardest. So the question isn't why only half of them went Spanish. It's why any of them did.

Languages around the world tend to acquire colour words in a broadly similar order — black and white first, then red, then green and yellow, then blue, then the rest. Line the Tagalog colours up against that ordering:

Itim, puti

black and white — native, and they held

Pula

red — native, and it held

Dilaw

yellow — native, and it held

Berde

green — from Spanish verde, and this is where it gives

Asul

blue — from Spanish azul

Lila, rosas, kahel

purple, pink, orange — Spanish took the everyday slot

The earlier a colour sits in that sequence, the better the Tagalog survived — not a perfect pattern, but one broadly recognised. Tagalog still has kayumanggi for brown and abo for grey, but the later Spanish influence is clear.

It looks like English might now be winning blue by a completely different route. Spanish arrived through a household and a church. English arrives through a classroom and a screen: under the education policy here, science and math are taught in English. A Filipino child probably learns the colours of the spectrum from a parent or grandparent. But they really learn them, and are quizzed on them, in a classroom at an early age, in English.

And by the way, bughaw didn't die. It's in the national anthem — Sa simoy at sa langit mong bughaw, in your breeze and your blue sky. Which is exactly its flavour: bughaw leans towards the blue of a sky, where asul is the everyday, any-object blue. Every Filipino has sung that line since primary school. So my friends were right and the flashcard was right at the same time. A word list can tell you bughaw means blue. It cannot tell you that bughaw is in the anthem, asul is used in the market, and blue is used in the classroom. Knowing which is which isn't vocabulary. It's the thing vocabulary turns into.

In everyday conversation you'll often hear someone say, “Wow, that's deep Tagalog though — nobody uses that anymore.” It's hard to know which word is which when you're studying flashcards or from a textbook. Think of it like old-fashioned English. We don't say “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,” and we don't write like the King James Bible. Only speaking can tell you which words are the deep Tagalog ones when you're first learning — that, or the slight smile a Filipino gives you when you use one and they respond, “Ha, we don't use that word anymore, just say asul. Or better yet, blue.” Sige, works for me. One less flashcard to memorise!