balik

I'm only a month or so into really trying to learn Tagalog, so I'm not yet at the stage where I can speak. But words have started to “flash” before my eyes. No, I'm not dying, and not yet gone crazy. I just think that, barely — maybe barely — this language is starting to stick.

I know enough vocabulary now that Tagalog flashes through my head, as I call it. Someone says something in a conversation in English, my brain automatically translates it, and the word flashes past. Bird → ibon. Celebration → pagdiriwang. I saw a lizard on the wall yesterday and my brain reached for butiki before it reached for lizard. I think that's progress, ha.

Small progress indeed. Now, when given the opportunity, my brain sort of tries to speak Tagalog instead of English. I'm finding it easier for some reason to just say malapit sa [insert some location], or oo, pero gusto ko [something]. Slowly but surely, the peros and the gusto kos and the words here and there are starting to flow. It's happening with obscure words too. The other day punla, the Tagalog word for seedling, flashed into my head randomly on a work call related to agriculture and reforestation. I don't understand how brains work, but I'll take it.

I've tried and kind of failed to learn Tagalog a few times. Maybe not failed so much as life happens — I got distracted by something else, or I was undisciplined. This time I wanted it to stick, but I felt stuck. So a few weeks ago I started with the simplest thing I could think of. For the next three-day weekend, every noun I saw I would jot down, look up the Tagalog for later, and memorize.

The list was in a notebook, and I think in total it came to around 250 to 300 nouns I spotted across those days. You'd be amazed how few words you actually need to get going, and this activity sort of proved it. TagTalk has close to 6,000 nouns in the dictionary, but three days of living only turned up maybe 300, over and over. There was knife and fork and plate and water and food — the usual. But I went at least another level deep and tried to find ANYthing that was a noun: dirt, roof, wall, fence, tree, leaf, roots. Anything I saw. At one point I asked ChatGPT to brainstorm more common nouns related to my list, to see whether I was missing anything, and it only turned up a few more that I had actually seen. Even then it was still only 300. Totally manageable, and by the end of the weekend I had most of them memorized.

For anyone feeling stuck at an early stage of learning, I'd totally recommend this approach. Whether in the Philippines or anywhere else, just go around for 48 hours and learn the Tagalog word for every noun you see, then go around naming them as often as you can, like a crazy person. It's simple, it works like magic, it's a huge confidence boost, and it makes the whole thing feel more manageable.

But what really struck me was how fast my own brain shifted. At first it took a concerted effort to look around and practice. There's a tree — puno. It's a plant — halaman — with a what? A leaf, which is dahon. But soon, and I mean very soon, I'd walk around that weekend and see an object and the Tagalog would come to me first. It's the simplest real-life Tagalog starting point you can have, and the tiniest example of how words — simple nouns and objects — can quickly move from being just a flashcard into something tangible and real.

Jump forward to today, just a few weeks later, and my brain keeps trying to use those same words and many others in real life. Yesterday I was in a Grab car and, like many drivers in Davao, mine was particularly friendly and chatty. I'm still really shy, but I'm getting better at just coming out of the gate and trying to use Tagalog. Like always, I still run out of words super fast. But where I could, I still inserted Tagalog to practice throughout the conversation, even switching back and forth between English and Tagalog sentences.

The key takeaway from all of this is to put yourself in a situation where you can spot gaps in your learning. Looking for nouns I didn't know is the easiest starting point, but the Grab car conversation served the same purpose. Dang it, how do I say I just got back to Davao? I know babalik if I will return, but what is just return? I'm not even sure it's the verb balik. And if I want to say I want to go somewhere, is it gusto ko papunta sa [] or gusto ko pamunta sa []? Which one is the infinitive form again? Effffffffffff. All of the above, and like sixty-three other things I realized I didn't know how to say. And that was just a five-minute Grab car ride.

In fact, there was so much I did not know that it was way too much to write down or remember specifically.

So today, I recreated the entire conversation and wrote it out. Then I tried to say it out loud, over and over, to myself and to the mirror. Alone. Like a crazy person. It's amazing how fast those gaps close. If I hadn't gone around trying to name trees, I'd never have learned puno. If I hadn't tried to speak yesterday in the Grab car, I wouldn't have realized I still have a long way to go before I can tell my story, or say who I am, or ask about someone else's story, where they are from, or who they are, all in Tagalog.

So trying to speak almost guarantees we'll fail immediately. But only by failing do we see the gaps and get a second — or third, or fourth — chance later. And next time I'm in a Grab car, I'll be ready. That is, until I run out of words again — and I'll be back to talking to myself and the mirror. People say mirrors are your best judge, and that may be true for other things, but thankfully in this case it can't hear my Tagalog — it can only see me trying.

The word I needed was bumalik. The reason I couldn't find it is because Tagalog has a bunch of different words for coming, going, arriving and passing through.

Prior to the Grab ride yesterday, I knew babalik really well, because I have spent a lot of time telling people when I was going to return to the Philippines, and much, much less time talking about having just returned once I got here. That is the power of speaking, and the way it quietly reinforces whatever you actually use. And if anyone is wondering: it's gusto kong pumunta, not papunta, if you want to go somewhere (but more on that below). If you're still struggling with this kind of basic grammar as well, have no fear — you are in good company.

But the real reason I was confused is that there are a lot of ways to say this. I'm coming, I just came, I'm coming through, I'm passing through, I arrived, I'm visiting. I've been seeing all of these different options across flashcard decks recently, and in the moment in that Grab car I could not place the right one.

Punta

going to a place

Balik

returning, coming back

Dating

arriving

Daan

passing by, going through

Uwi

going home

Galing

having come from — used bare, no affix needed

You are likely familiar enough with Tagalog at this point to predict that each has its own conjugation, which is the good news rather than the bad: for the -um- ones here the pattern starts to repeat, so you learn it once and a lot of it carries across. You've probably already studied or seen these words countless times.

• Dumating ako kanina.I arrived earlier.
• Darating siya bukas.She'll arrive tomorrow.
• Dumaan ako sa opisina.I passed by the office.
• Umuwi na ako.I've gone home already.
• Galing ako sa palengke.I've come from the market.

And one more on the sentence I actually wanted. Bumalik ako sa Davao means I returned to Davao — true, but it doesn't carry the just. For that you want Kakabalik ko lang sa Davao, or Nakabalik na ako sa Davao for I'm back now. I just learned both of these about an hour ago, so if you are as confused as me, no worries.

Which brings us back to papunta. It actually is not a conjugation at all, and this is something I was confused by for at least the last year. Put pa- on the front of one of these roots and you get a direction or a state rather than an action — headed there, headed back, on the way home, about to leave. I cannot believe I missed this until very recently, but once you notice it one time, it shows up everywhere. Check out the below:

Papunta

heading there

Pabalik

heading back

Pauwi

heading home

Paalis

about to leave

The above are different from pupunta — with a pu, not a pa. Pupunta is a conjugation. Papunta is not.

Chances are, you are not the only person in that Grab car speaking a language they haven't finished learning. You're just the most obvious one.

The Philippines is one of the most multilingual countries on earth. Somewhere around 180 living languages, depending on who is counting. Most Filipinos grow up with a home language, then Filipino, then English, and move between all three constantly. Speaking imperfectly in your second or third language isn't as big of a deal here as it might be in, say, the US. While the US is incredibly diverse and multicultural, there is a subtle, underlying expectation that you'll speak fluent English. It's way less pressure in the Philippines, and that's a good thing for language learning.

In short, it changes what a mistake costs. There is a widely known joke that one of the hardest places to learn French is France, because of a reputation for being unforgiving of even the tiniest mistakes. Filipinos, not so much. Where almost everyone in the room is operating outside their first language, a badly built sentence isn't unusual enough to be worth judging.

So here is a quick toolkit I use to try to keep the conversation going in as much Tagalog as possible, for when you start to run out of words like I always do. These three buy you the time to find the word, instead of the silence that ends the conversation.

Gusto mo bang ___?

I use it for do you want, or do you like — hands the conversation back instead of ending it, and usually gets people to say a sentence or two

Meron ka bang ___?

do you have ___? — works with almost any noun you already know. Pro tip: always ask about kids (anak), a spouse (asawa) or a partner (jowa)

Anong ___ sa Tagalog?

what's ___ in Tagalog? — fills the gap on the spot, and usually gets you a mini freebie Tagalog lesson

Researchers who study language learning talk about willingness to communicate — how ready you are to open your mouth when you don't strictly have to. It matters for a fairly mundane reason: you only ever get corrected on sentences you actually said. A driver who lets you mangle three wrong sentences in a row is doing more for your Tagalog than you could probably ever imagine — even if he's not correcting your grammar or teaching you new words, the process is highlighting gaps in what you don't know.

When you speak, it won't be perfect, but you will spot the gaps. And with every gap comes second chances, especially in the Philippines.