Customer Reviews

Pilipino-English/English-Pilipino Phrasebook and Dictionary (Hippocrene Concise Dictionary)

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Good , easy book for beginning tagalog speakers and readers.it helped me a lot..

There are so many mistakes in the grammar section and not enough words. I bought this for my friend who was going to the Philippines but had I known how incomplete it was, I would have just given him a real dictionary instead.

This little book has enough phrases to enable an absolute beginner to get around. There is a truly basics-only grammar section and many categories of phrases that are really quite useful, and it is very compact, so it is easy to carry around, and thus likely to actually be used.

However, its conciseness is also its greatest limitation. The "dictionaries" (glossaries) are much too small to be of practical use. The "basic grammar" sections, likewise, are so abbreviated that they leave more questions than they answer. Nevertheless, you can get the gist of how the language is constructed.

This is definitely NOT a Tagalog textbook; to try to use it as such would be very frustrating. But it is a fine on-the-street, quick reference for the novice traveler, restaurant goer, shopper, or lover, etc.; just enough for the quick, basic phrases needed to get along, but not so much as to overwhelm or weigh you down.