23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for the Nervous?, January 18, 2007
The title of this book is too short to be true to its contents and approach. It should be called "Teach yourself Tagalog, with a lot of help from your Filipino friends and a bottle of tranquilizers".
To be fair, a lot of hard and productive thinking has plainly gone into the design of this course. The underlying learning objectives for each of the twenty units are sensibly chosen, and the progression from unit to unit is intelligently planned and well paced. The dialogues generally are excellent examples of how to make introductory material understandable to beginners while not compromising too much on truthfulness to the living language, and there is a good mixture of strictly language-focussed learning with bite-sized but nevertheless generally informative cultural snippets.
One pervasive problem, though, is that syllable stresses are never marked in the printed texts. This is a serious drawback for the solo learner. Although real-life Tagalog texts, apart from examples in dictionaries and grammars, do not mark stresses (or final glottal stops), such markings are essential in primers meant for self-instruction, because Tagalog has many forms whose meaning is drastically changed by different stresses or the presence or absence of a final glottal stop. Unless these things are plainly indicated on the printed page, the learner is all too liable get into the habit of pronouncing such words wrongly, with maybe unfortunate results.
The accompanying CDs are not likely to be of much help. It's surprising how many publishers of language teaching materials (the BBC being a notable exception) don't realise that speaking such dialogues convincingly requires professional voice-acting skills, which are sadly lacking to the speakers used here. They are obviously natives, but that's not enough.
An even more serious problem with this volume, however, is its disconcertingly neurotic and unfocussed approach to grammatical explanation. A good language teacher knows how to build the learner's confidence by revealing and explaining the more difficult aspects of the target language in a controlled and progressive way. But this is not the same as making repeated pre-emptive strikes against anticipated panic attacks, especially if the alleged grounds for panic often seem slender anyway. This little volume is dominated by the assumption that the would-be learner of Tagalog is of a highly nervous disposition and is likely to flee in terror and never come back if such shocking terms as "verb" or "consonant" are mentioned without the accompaniment of soothing noises and profuse apologies for touching on unpleasant topics.
Now it's rather hard to write any effective language course, let alone one for a language as distant from European structures as Tagalog, while shielding the reader entirely from grammatical considerations (and therefore also grammatical terms of one sort or another); but at points when that necessity can't be avoided, the reader of this book is invariably reassured that there is "no need to panic" or be "bewildered", or they are urged to "try not to worry about" the point of grammar in question. The use of "try" here subliminally suggests that there are indeed grounds for anxiety, even though this particular phrase is used, for example, to soften the apparently crushing news that the plural form of a certain pronoun differs from the singular. But the reassurances are seldom followed by satisfactory explanations of the supposedly "frightening" items; instead, the recommended course is frequently to "ask your Filipino friends". Which for some learners a long way from the Philippines or from, say, a major healthcare centre, might well be something of a problem
In general, the grammatical explanations tend to make much ado about "explaining" things that will be perfectly plain to most people interested in learning a language anyway, or else they treat side issues at some length, while overlooking things the learner is more likely to find troublesome. For instance, in the first lesson, after a table of the main personal pronouns, we read the following "explanation":
Notice that "you" (singular) has two forms: ka and ikaw. The simple difference is that ka is always used as part of a sentence ... whereas ikaw can stand alone (without being used in a sentence).
Now that's true, but it's hardly what a learner most needs to know. Since, as this explanation correctly implies, both 'ikaw' and 'ka' can indeed "be used in a sentence", what the learner really wants to be told is which one of them to use in a given sentence (they are never interchangeable, and in some circumstances neither is used). On this matter, the authors are silent.
In lesson 2 we are introduced to the words "sino?" and "ano?". "Sino?", we are correctly told, means "who?" and is used to ask about persons, whereas "ano?" means "what?" and is used to ask about things. Since this is one of the rare occasions where there is a close match between English and Tagalog, that much should be plain sailing. But our ever-anxious guides feel it's necessary to remark "don't worry if this sounds daunting," which is more likely to give readers a disturbing sense that they must have somehow skipped a daunting bit without noticing it.
Yet in the very next lesson the authors broach a genuinely difficult point with no such show of concern, via a casual aside. After outlining the distinction between two Tagalog words for different types of negation, 'hindi' and 'wala', they continue, as though they were adding something perfectly obvious: "unlike 'hindi', 'wala' is followed by a ligatured pronoun". Now this really should be something to be worried about, because you will search in vain in earlier pages for any mention of a "ligatured pronoun", and such items are not likely to be in any learner's grammatical carry-on luggage. Our unfortunate learner is suddenly deprived of the assurances doled out so extensively and unnecessarily elsewhere, and left to work out the meaning from a couple of uncommented examples, before being puzzled still further by being told that "when followed by a noun, 'wala' takes a ligature". These two statements are more or less correct, though not particularly well expressed. But they presuppose that readers know what a ligature is in Tagalog (and other Philippine languages) and what "taking" one involves, and yet they are offered no explanation of the matter and are denied even the usual claim that they "need not worry", or can turn to those long-suffering "Filipino friends" for enlightenment.
The book's most serious shortcomings in grammatical explanation, however, concern what many believe to be the key to mastery of Tagalog: the verb system with its multiple voices (or, in an alternative terminology, "focus"). The authors' approach here is to pick on things that can be made to look, at a pinch, a little like the verb system of European languages and keep quiet about the rest. Many of the issues they leave untouched are, inevitably, exemplified in the dialogues, but they are left either completely unmentioned, or kept gingerly at bay via yet more referrals to those helpful friends.
Overall, for people who are lucky enough to have native-speaker friends or family, and want to have a go at understanding what they say in Tagalog and take a stab at talking back, without any particular ambition to get beyond basic oral communication, this volume is good enough. It could also provide a serviceable text book for, say, an adult evening class taken by a teacher who could substitute his or her own grammatical explanations for those in the text while drawing on the strengths of the general structure and dialogues. But for solo learners who do not have ready access to a patient native speaker or who want to go beyond everyday gist comprehension and formulaic utterances, this book might just do more harm than good, because it merely toys with the real areas of difficulty and manages to obfuscate rather than clarify them in the mind of any reader with an ambition to get beyond the basics.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with elementary language courses. But, like elementary schools, what they teach and how they teach it shouldn't hamper the progress of those who want to go on to more demanding levels. Sadly, anyone who got to the end of this course then wanted take their knowledge of this fascinating language still further might well find they needed to forget most of the grammatical explanations offered them here and start all over again. The Teach Yourself series contains a splendid counter-example of how to get beginners confidently started on a difficult language and at the same time equip them for much more advanced studies if they so choose, in the form of Teach Yourself Korean, by Mark Vincent and Yeon Jaehoon. But that's another language, and maybe, one day, another review.
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