Customer Reviews

Handbook of Tagalog Verbs

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When I study a language, I go for the verbs. Tagalog verbs are extremely difficult, as there are many different forms each verb root can take. This book helps a lot to show the different forms a particular verb root can take and what they all mean. My only complaint is that it does not have enough verbs in it, only 200.

Without doubt, the most difficult aspect of learning Tagalog is verb conjugation. To be able to understand "focus", affixes and roots gives you an immediate recogniiton of what is being said and what is being written.

As a beginner/intermediate student, I typically learn in a "rules" based fashion. This reference guide (and no it is NOT a phrase book) teaches you to recognize repeated patterns in the structure of the verbs.

I thoroughly recommend this book. The excellent introductory chapter clearly explains how to interpret the verb tables. There are approximately 200 Tagalog verbs shown in the tables. Someone mentioned above that they wish the number was increased. However, if you study the conjugation of these 200 verbs - you will be able to conjugate 99% of all verbs.

Tagalog verbs are very hard for the non-tagalog to understand. It's a lot of hard work and you will have to dig a little deeper. If you thought that Tagalog was an easy language and that you would master it with this book you were wrong. On the other hand this book will be a great help for those who are serious students of Tagalog. If you are just trying to learn a phrase or two...this is not you book.

The book is the reprint of an old publication typed in Courier characters on a typewriter. One would expect a modernized version in Times Roman characters. The authors ignored the accent system devised for Tagalog about a century ago. Only a minority of verbal forms have their stress(es) indicated by the acute accent. Too many are left without accent(s). One of the reasons why I bought this manual was to know how ma- verbs were stressed. These verbs were typed without accents. I suppose a beginner will be disappointed for all the verbs conjugated in this book because of its very limited use of the acute accent. What is also missing is the government of verbs. For instance tanóng "ask" has the reference pattern magtanóng ang A ng B sa C "A to ask B to C". The average student cannot guess this.

I don't know how those 501 verbs books work for all those other languages available right now, but I suppose I expected this book to show different types of verbs in Tagalog AND explain how they are used. There is a paradigm of different verbs inflected by aspects and modes, but with no explanation as to how the verb would be used. I was quite disappointed.