I've been fortunate enough to travel a good part of this world. Not just the tourist-brochure version — the real version. Sitting in someone's home, eating food I couldn't name, stumbling through greetings in a language I had no right to be attempting. And I've noticed something consistent: the moment you try to speak someone's language — even badly, even just a few words — something shifts. A wall comes down. You stop being a visitor and start being a person.
That experience is why I want to use this blog to teach languages. Not textbook languages. Real ones, spoken by real people, with all the history and messiness and beauty that comes with them.
We're starting with Filipino.
But before we learn a single word, we need to talk about what Filipino actually is — and how it sits in relationship to Spanish and English. Because if you walk into Filipino thinking it works like either of those languages, you're going to be confused fast. And if you understand the landscape first, everything that comes after will make more sense.
This post is the foundation. No vocabulary lists. Just context.
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What Is Filipino, Exactly?
First, a distinction worth making: Filipino and Tagalog are related but not identical, and people use both terms in ways that overlap.
Tagalog is the regional language that originated in and around Manila and the surrounding provinces of Luzon. It's been spoken there for centuries, long before any colonial power arrived.
Filipino is the national standardized language of the Philippines, officially adopted in the 1987 constitution. It's built on a Tagalog base but was designed to incorporate vocabulary from the Philippines' other regional languages — there are over 180 languages spoken across the archipelago. In practice, especially in modern urban usage, Filipino and Tagalog are close enough that learning one is learning the other. When people say "I'm learning Tagalog," they usually mean they're learning Filipino. When you hear Filipino on the street in Manila, it's essentially Tagalog.
For this series, I'll use Filipino as the primary term but reference Tagalog when the distinction matters.
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The Spanish Layer
Here's the first thing that surprises most people: a huge slice of Filipino vocabulary is Spanish.
The Philippines was a Spanish colony for 333 years — from 1565 to 1898. That is not a short occupation. Three centuries of administration, Catholic conversion, trade, and cultural overlap left a permanent mark on the language. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of Filipino vocabulary has Spanish roots.
You'll hear it everywhere:
- • The word for door is pinto (from Spanish puerta → adapted)
- • Numbers: Filipinos often use uno, dos, tres in casual counting alongside native Tagalog numbers
- • Days of the week: Lunes, Martes, Miyerkules, Huwebes, Biyernes — recognizable to any Spanish speaker
- • Months of the year: Enero, Pebrero, Marso — January, February, March
- • Religious vocabulary: Diyos (God, from Dios), Simbahan (church, from Cimba + -han)
- • Family terms: Tita, Tito (aunt, uncle) — pure Spanish tía, tío
So if you speak Spanish, you have a meaningful head start on Filipino vocabulary. You'll recognize words constantly. People are genuinely surprised by this when they first arrive in the Philippines — they'll hear a sentence that sounds alien and then catch three words they know from Spanish class.
But here's the critical thing: Spanish only gave Filipino its words, not its grammar. The structure — how sentences are built, how verbs work, how meaning is organized — is entirely different from Spanish. You can borrow a word and leave the grammar behind, and that's exactly what happened. The Spanish vocabulary plugged into a pre-existing Tagalog grammatical framework and stayed there.
So Spanish helps you with vocabulary. It does not help you with structure.
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The English Layer
The second colonial chapter came when Spain sold the Philippines to the United States after the Spanish-American War in 1898. American rule lasted until 1946, and even after independence the influence never really left.
English is an official language of the Philippines today, alongside Filipino. It's taught in schools from the beginning. The educated population is broadly bilingual. Government, law, business, medicine, and higher education operate heavily in English.
The result is that English has poured into everyday Filipino in a way that goes beyond formal vocabulary. Modern Filipino is full of English words used casually in conversation:
- • Kumain ka na? ("Have you eaten yet?") might get the response "Hindi pa, I'm on my way."
- • Someone might say "Mag-meet tayo bukas" — mixing the Tagalog verb prefix mag- with the English word meet
- • Load (phone credit), mall, cellphone, laptop — used daily without translation
This hybrid is so common it has its own name: Taglish — Tagalog and English blended mid-sentence. Taglish isn't slang or broken language. It's how educated, fluent speakers actually talk in Manila and across urban Philippines. When you get comfortable enough with Filipino to code-switch naturally, you've arrived.
For English speakers, this means you already understand a significant slice of what you'll hear. And more importantly, Filipinos are used to English. They're not going to look at you blankly if you drop an English word when you can't find the Tagalog one. They do it too.
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So What Makes Filipino Different From Both?
If Spanish loaned the vocabulary and English is widely shared — what's actually hard about Filipino?
The answer is the grammar, which comes from neither Spanish nor English. It comes from the Austronesian language family, a group that stretches from Madagascar to Easter Island and includes languages like Malay, Indonesian, Hawaiian, and Malagasy. Filipino sits in this family, and its structure reflects that.
A few things that will challenge speakers of European languages:
Sentences often start with the verb, not the subject.
In English: The man ate the rice.
In Filipino structure: Ate the man the rice. (Roughly — Kumain ang lalaki ng kanin.)
This verb-first pattern (called VSO — Verb-Subject-Object) is the norm, not the exception. Your instinct to lead with the subject needs to be retrained.
Verbs aren't conjugated for person — they're marked for focus.
Spanish has six conjugated forms for every tense: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan. English has fewer but still marks person. Filipino verbs don't change based on who is doing the action. Instead, they change based on what role in the sentence is being emphasized — whether the focus is the actor, the object, the location, the beneficiary. This "focus system" is the structural core of Filipino and the thing that takes the most time to internalize.
There are no grammatical genders.
Spanish makes every noun masculine or feminine — el libro, la mesa. Filipino doesn't. No gendered articles, no gendered adjectives, no agreement rules. One less thing to manage.
Time works differently than tense.
Filipino verbs don't strictly mark past, present, and future the way English and Spanish do. Instead they mark aspect — whether an action is completed, ongoing, or not yet started. The timing comes from context and time words, not from the verb form itself. This is a shift in how you think about actions in time.
Particles do a lot of the work.
Filipino has small words — ang, ng, sa — that function like grammatical traffic signs, marking the topic of the sentence, showing possession or direction, indicating location. These particles have no clean English equivalent and they appear constantly. Learning to read them is like learning to read punctuation in a new way.
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Why This Context Matters
I'm not telling you any of this to be discouraging. I'm telling you because context is the fastest shortcut to learning.
If you walk into Filipino thinking "it's like Spanish with different words," you'll be constantly confused by the grammar. If you think "it's like English spoken with an accent," you'll miss the entire structural system. But if you understand from the start that Filipino is:
- • Grammatically Austronesian — its own system, not European
- • Vocabulary-rich with Spanish loanwords — a real advantage if you know Spanish
- • Comfortable with English — code-switching is natural, not a failure
- • Built around verb-focus and particles — the core things to learn
...then every lesson has a place to land. You know what's familiar and what's genuinely new. You stop fighting the language and start working with it.
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What's Coming
This is post one. Here's where we're going in the series:
- • Next: Filipino sounds and the alphabet — how it actually sounds, what's easy for English speakers, what trips people up
- • Then: Core particles — ang, ng, sa — the three words that explain everything
- • Then: Basic sentence structure with real examples
- • Then: Essential greetings and how to actually use them (not just memorize them)
By the end of a handful of posts, you won't be fluent. But you'll understand the architecture of the language well enough to start building inside it — and that's the only foundation worth having.
If you've spent time in the Philippines, have Filipino friends or family, or just got curious after a conversation somewhere on the road — welcome. This series is for you.
Magsimula tayo. Let's begin.
— Dr. Scott