Customer Reviews

Conversational Tagalog: A Functional-Situational Approach

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I found this book complimented my other books well in learning Tagalog. There are many gramatical explinations and good vocabulary builders. The focus is not pure memorization but to develop your skills in the language and understand how it works. The text is probably better for a more structured learning environment. It is not geared towards the "Teach yourself" learner.

This book does include many useful phrases, and will teach you some basic vocabulary. However, the instruction on grammar stops at giving examples of phrases. Given a slightly different situation, the examples you've memorized could be rendered useless. A good book for those going to the Philippines for the first time and those who want just enough to get by on. If your aim is fluency or actual conversation, however, I would look somewhere else.

For self-instruction, this book is just OK. It does provide a decent introduction to the vocabulary and grammar, but don't expect to be able to speak or understand much Tagalog at the end. The grammatical explanations are confined to describing the forms of the word, but almost nothing is said about HOW the forms are used (especially the different verb forms, the heart of the language). You will have no idea how to use an actor-focus verb versus an object-focus verb. On the other hand, I do like the vocabulary lists at the back that are arranged by topic. Ramos' strong point is providing some information about Filipino culture. This one not bad given some limitations; you could do worse. But for serious learners, I recommend Pilipino Through Self-Instruction, by John Wolff, et al., from Cornell.

This was a wonderful. It is a great way to learn to speak tagalog and unlike other products almost everything I say, my Tagalog speaking friends understand just exactly what I'm talking about. If you buy this book you should Definitely buy a tagalog-english/english-tagalog dictionary because this book was designed for a class room that has a teacher to explain pronunciation and different words. It has a tagalog-english glossary in the back, but if you are like me (still learning) you will be looking back there (in the glossary) at least 4 to 5 times per page that you read and there is only a 50% chance that the word you will be looking for is there. By the end of this book you will have a better understanding of tagalog sentence structure, be able to speak conversationally in a variety of situation (not all situations), and will be impressing your filipino friends and their famlies. O sige, Diyan ka na. Pupunta ako sa aklatan. Paalam

The best thing about this book is that it presents all kinds of situations that are culturally relevant to the Philippines, and are good conversation-starters for in-class dialogues and improvisation. With a teacher, the book can be quite useful, and the lessons are broken up neatly into 1-day segments, without depending much on the sequence in which they are used. The grammar is spotty and there are better places to go for that. (Wolff's books are the best for grammar in my opinion.) Also, this book won't tell you what many words mean, and even the vocab sections don't have pronunciations listed. This can be a problem, as it's not always clear how to find a work in a dictionary, plus accent often changes from the forms that you find in the dictionary. In short, this book is much less useful if you don't have a teacher that you see every day. Nonetheless, as far as I know, it is the most widely used book for instruction in Tagalog university courses around the US.