init

When I hear the word init, I think: hot. Actually, what happens now is that I hear init and somewhere inside my brain the concept of hot just registers. In fact it's harder now for me to remember what init is in English than to simply use the word. I don't translate it anymore when speaking or hearing it. Init is init. Or in short, it's become a real word.

But it wasn't always like that. I distinctly remember the first time I needed to use that word. I was on the corner of Bacaca Road and Maharlika Highway in Davao on a hot mid-afternoon run and had to ask ChatGPT for the word for hot. Mainit.

Init is like the easiest word ever now. I use it to describe the weather, or when ordering a coffee, multiple times a day. But at the time the word seemed weird, overwhelming and hard to remember. What is the word for hot again? Finally I had to keep saying to myself: init, like “E-neat,” like “I'm IN-it,” like I'm in the heat, or in an oven.

For a short while after that, every single time I wanted to use the word, my brain would go something like this:

I need the word for hot. — Oh my god, what is the word for hot. — Ahh, I'm in it. — Yeah, but it's not “in it,” the i is like an e in Tagalog. — E-it. — No, it's not E-it. — E-neat. — Init. — Yes. Init.

(Side note: The word I actually needed was mainit, but that would have short-circuited my brain entirely at that stage of learning.)

Lots of overhead and processing power just to say a four-letter, extremely common word.

It feels overwhelming, but I've come to learn and understand that it's completely normal when learning a language, especially one like Tagalog that is so different from English. And one where the words always seem to look the same. Why are there so many A's in this language? Haven't I seen that word before? I swear I've seen sunog before and it means sound — why does it say sunog is for burned, burnt, burning? Omg, sound is tunog, not sunog. Why is the word for sound the one that starts with a t?

I've come to realise that 99% of the words I learn go through three phases.

1. Completely unfamiliar. I have nothing to latch on to, so I have to make something up in order to remember it. This is where things get silly. Also extremely high overhead, not really conversational.
2. Translated. The English word flows through my head first, and then I have to translate it into Tagalog while speaking. Still very high overhead, but sometimes conversational.
3. A real word. The word becomes its own thing, like init. I don't have to translate anything in my head anymore — the word and the concept are connected. Init is init. The conversation flows naturally.

Everyone has different learning styles, but for the most part I've observed that at an early stage of learning a language, words have to go through those three stages. It's only later, after some time speaking, that you start blitzing through conjugations you never studied, or attaching pala-'s and magka-'s you've never formally learned to root words you already know. Most of us therefore spend a lot of time trying to drag words out of stage one and into stage three, and it can feel overwhelming.

So what do I do during these times, or any time I need to learn a new word? I make up something silly in my head. I often think to myself that if anyone could hear my inner thoughts they would put me in an asylum. Here's what it actually sounds like inside my brain — in this example, reviewing some roots and adjectives.

• BarkadaDogs bark. Dogs stay in packs, like a dog pack. Friend groups are like your dog pack. — friend group, your inner circle
• SigawThat must be pronounced “sea-gaw,” like a sea gull. Sea gulls are loud. They're always shouting at each other. — shouting, a shout
• BalatLike balut. If you eat balut you have to take off the what? The balat. Balut, balat. — skin, hide, peel
• BilogThat must be pronounced “bee-log.” Be a log. Logs are round. — a circle, and being round
• MalinamnamIt's like mali plus nam nam. Like nom nom nom. Like oh my god, nom nom nom, this food is so good. — savoury, deeply flavourful
• DasalAh, like that insanely hard running race in Mindanao, Datu Salumay, which everyone calls Dasal. Going to take a prayer to get through that race. — praying, a prayer
• BaliLike something good, completely broken and fractured. Exactly like Bali the island, totally broken and ruined now. — breaking something long, the fracture left behind

And so on, thousands of times. Some of them don't even make sense at all. Some are super inappropriate. Some are so silly I'd be way too shy to say them out loud. But man, do they work.

And hilariously, in some cases this technique works by accident, because similar patterns are actually used by everyone, knowingly or not. I used to remember hukay — to dig — by thinking of ukay-ukay, the second-hand markets where you dig through piles of clothes looking for good finds. It was months later that I found out ukay-ukay is called that because of ukay, the Cebuano word for digging and sifting through something, and that Cebuano ukay and Tagalog hukay come down from the same ancient root. My “stupid” mnemonic was accidentally etymology.

There are times — I don't know, maybe 1% of the time — when a word just immediately goes to stage two, or even stage three. I have no idea why and there is no pattern. Likewise, there sometimes seems to be no pattern to when and why certain words stick. For three or four days I could not for the life of me remember the word for hair, buhok, no matter what I tried or which technique I applied. Then I woke up one day and, without studying it again, I knew it, as if it had always been in stage three.

The brain is weird like that. Sometimes all it requires is patience, but it can feel like a process where you have no control. So if you're ever feeling like this, don't panic. Just make up something funny in your head, give it some time, and before you know it the word will be like something you've always known.

There is one more trick, and it's the one that compounds: learn the root first. Tagalog builds enormous families of words out of small roots, so learning one root properly often hands you six or seven words for free.

Take ibig. On its own it means love, or to desire. Short, unremarkable, easy to walk past. Now look at what's built on top of it.

• ibiglove, to desire — the root
• pag-ibiglove, the thing itself
• kaibiganfriend
• magkaibigantwo people who are friends with each other
• magkakaibigana whole group of friends
• makipagkaibiganto make friends with someone
• pagkakaibiganfriendship
• umibigto love
• maibiginloving, affectionate

Kaibigan is a good word to see this on, because it's oddly spelled for an English speaker and genuinely hard for most people at first. It is ka- + ibig + -an — roughly, the one your affection is held in common with. Once you can see that, it stops being five random syllables and becomes a much more logical, recognizable, easier to remember word.

Once kaibigan leaves stage two and lands in stage three, you don't only stop translating friend in your head. You also get magkaibigan, magkakaibigan and makipagkaibigan more or less for free, because you already know the root and you're only reading the affixes around it. Notice how magkakaibigan gets its group-sized meaning by repeating a syllable — that doubling turns up all over Tagalog. Amazing.

The same thing happens with today's word.

• initheat — the root
• mainithot
• uminitto heat up, to become hot
• painitinto heat something up
• pampainita heater, something that warms
• tag-initsummer, the hot season

Six words, one root. You are not memorising six things — you are memorising one thing, and learning what ma-, -um-, pa-…-in, pam- and tag- do. Those affixes then work on many of the other roots you learn.

It works in the other direction too. When a long word arrives that you've never seen, strip the affixes off and hunt for the root inside. Palabiro looks impossible until you spot biro, joke, sitting in the middle of it — and pala- means fond of doing something, so a palabiro is someone who is always joking. Same with palatanong, from tanong, a question: someone who asks a lot of them. And a bunch more just like that.

Some words skip the whole process. If you've spent any time around Spanish, a surprising amount of Tagalog is already sitting in stage three waiting for you.

Spain governed the Philippines for more than three centuries, and the vocabulary stayed behind. One count of a major Tagalog-English dictionary found that about a third of the root entries are of Spanish origin. Studies of what people actually say day to day put it closer to 20%. Either figure is enormous.

Take a word like libre. Many English speakers have already heard it ten thousand times, with a meaning closely associated to how it's used in Tagalog, so moving it into stage three takes about three seconds: ah, okay, so it's libre here too. Got it.

Ever noticed how much of the kitchen is Spanish?

Kutsara

spoon — from cuchara

Tinidor

fork — from tenedor

Kutsilyo

knife — from cuchillo

Plato

plate — from plato

Baso

drinking glass — from vaso

Asukal

sugar — from azúcar

Mantika

cooking fat, lard — from manteca

Lababo

sink — from lavabo

There's a reason it clusters there. Borrowed words tend to arrive attached to borrowed things. The Spanish table came as a package — the fork and knife set, the plated course, the sugar, the household that used all of it — and the vocabulary travelled with the objects. Where the practice already existed, the Tagalog word simply stayed put. Kamayan, eating with your hands, never needed a Spanish name.

So there is a lot that is already familiar to learners coming from outside the Philippines. For the words that arrive free, be grateful. For the ones that refuse to stick, don't be afraid to be silly.

Silly — I don't know the word for it, but I've heard people use kulit, for “playful, mischievous, annoyingly persistent, or pestering.” Like “cool eat,” like “cool it,” the way a parent might say it to a child on a long road trip when the kid gets silly.

And now I know kulit. I just need to use it another ten or a hundred times before it sticks and I remember. I mean alala. I mean — “ah la la la la laaaaaaaaa,” like a child covering their ears because they already know what you're trying to tell them. Alala. I could keep going, but okay, okay, I'll stop.