2 comments about Teach Yourself Tagalog Complete Course.

1. May be a good book but this ISBN is not shipped with cd's as stated here and the shipped copy was published in 2003.

   McGraw-Hill sent me an email saying that this ISBN is shipped with two cd's and cost $24.95 which is what Amazon says is the retail price.

   I recommend you buy from McGraw and get the cd's.




2. Yep, I gotta agree. It's not what it appears to be. Shipped without the CD's, and their customer service says the CD's are not included. That should be made crystal clear in their product description, since this title normally includes CD's. I recommend buying from someone else that will include the CD's. After all, the spoken verbal audio is critical when learning a language.

5 comments about Mga Hayop na Bibilangin ni (Brian Wildsmith's Animals To Count (Tagalog edition).

1. Illustrations are excellant. Manufacture of book is poor quality ...



2. A beautiful little book, great fun for my kids and me. Has held up over 4 children.



3. I was expecting a book with English translation as well with phonetic letters to pronounce it in Farsi. A baby or a non-farsi reader cannot read it to a child for it is only in farsi writting. This book is definetly not a bilingual book for I have bought other books in other languages where you have both languages in it to accommondate the reader.



4. I purchased this for my Grandson (2 yrs old) whose Dad is Brazillian. The Dad looked at the book and said that only a couple of the words were correct translation. And the grammar was very poor and not what would be normally spoken in Brazil. He is a language teacher.
   
   The pictures were great!
   
   They threw the book away.



5. This book is quite small, with beautiful illustrations. It is very simple, and definitely for the super young ones.

No comments about English-Tagalog Dictionary.

No comments about Tagalog (World Languages).

No comments about Berlitz Filipino Tagalog: Phrase Book & Cd (Berlitz Phrase Book and CD Series).

4 comments about Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule.

1. Indian Influence to the Filipino What are the Characteristics of a people to become a "Datu" in the early time ? How does the early times classified the people ? What is the difference between Democratic and Monarchy Government ?



2. Indian Influence to the Filipino What are the Characteristics of a people to become a "Datu" in the early time ? How does the early times classified the people ? What is the difference between Democratic and Monarchy Government ?



3. The syncretic religion of the Philippines has often been seen as a failure to fully grasp a chosen truth. In Contracting Colonialism, Rafael is able to clarify this misunderstanding with a combination of historical accounts and a powerful insight. With this book, Vincente Rafael not only presents an excellent exercise for the mind, but he also establishes a strong reason for Spain's 'sweeping conversion' of the Tagalog tribe of the Philippines...Rafael has loosened the knot of faith's blindfold.



4. I was really dissapointed when I was reasearching to find that to get the right info, you have to buy the actual book. what happended to finding simple info without spending money--these days the internet is such a joke! I can't even find info on my topic! I really wish if you advertise you could at least give a one page interpretation. I need the real stuff!--

4 comments about Teach Yourself Tagalog Complete Course Audiopackage.

1. I think the book is available by itself. Buy just that. I am a native speaker and I bought this for a friend who wanted to learn Tagalog. I then listened to the CD and was appalled, APPALLED, at the butchery. The accents on the CD are ATROCIOUS and you would get laughed off the sidewalks of Manila if you spoke like the people on this CD; the women are shrill and campy and the men speak in an unnatural monotone. Buy the book, which in itself is a good introduction, but find a conversation partner to read the text to you.



2. Quite a good book to get you started learning your new language! The CDs are very helpful and really give you the edge to learning pronunciation. The only drawback to this book is that it is hard to know the pronunciation for the words not spoken on the CDs.
   
   However, the explanations on the uses of the words and topics are quite helpful and easy to understand. Also there are some good explanations of Tagalog expressions, as well as some explanations of the Pilipino culture.
   
   If you want lots of exercises you might want to get another book in adition to this one. However, they CDs make this book a very good tool in learning the language.
   
   I recommend buying the Hippocrene Standard Dictionary Tagalog-English/English-Tagalog by Carl R. Galves Rubino



3. This is a really great book and it has a good basis for what a new learner of the language would need, especially someone who is planning on traveling to the Philippines. The only thing that I have a hard time with is how fast they speak on the CDs, but that does make it more like it would be like in a real life situation.



4. 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.

5 comments about Beginning Tagalog: A Course for Speakers of English.

1. This is an excellent book, despite its unfortunate presentation. It's the only introductory manual I've seen that isn't scared to describe and teach Tagalog grammar and usage without fudging the significant differences between Austronesian and European languages. Other texts do that in a vain attempt to make Tagalog seem "easy" to foreigners, but the end result is that they make it harder than it needs to be, because they present a Europeanised version of the language that leaves learners helpless when confronted with authentic texts and native speakers.

   The key to grasping Tagalog is understanding the related concepts of "topic" and "focus", and this course has as its backbone the mastery of those notions. It also avoids the misleading claim that Tagalog has "tenses" and teaches how aspect plus particles does the same job in a different way. Another strong point is its detailed representation of pronunciation and intonation in the dialogues and examples. Stress is crucial in Tagalog for distinguishing between very different meanings of words apparently spelled the same, and solo learners especially need to see the stress patterns of the new words they learn (other manuals tend to mark stresses only in glossaries at the back, but just as students of French need to learn the gender of each and every noun as they first meet it, so learners of Tagalog need to see and learn up front the correct stress of every new piece of vocabulary).

   The only criticism I have of the core content is that it doesn't teach the techniques of root derivation which all learners need to acquire if they are to venture beyond the textbook itself (e.g. by dipping into the Tagalog resources available on the Internet). The majority of Tagalog words encountered "in the wild" are not to be found in their apparent alphabetical place in dictionaries. To look them up you need to know how to spot the root of the word, under which the dictionaries list it. If this issue had been tackled, then this book, used in conjunction with Fr Leo English's superb Tagalog-English Dictionary (sadly not sold outside the Philippines) and the Revised Edition of Carl Rubino's bilingual dictionary (much more restricted in scope than Fr. English's, but good for current colloquial usages) would really be all the serious learner needed to get a good grounding in the language.

   Given its fine qualities, it's a pity the book looks so awful. Large areas are taken up with poor-quality artwork with very dated images, and the real meat of the linguistic commentaries and cultural notes is mingled, without adequate typographical distinction, with often unnecessary full expansions of all the possible responses in the various drills suggested for class use. Given that the original work was always designed to be in two volumes, it would have been preferable to put these drills in vol 2 and incorporate the readings which make up Vol 2 (alas long since out of print) into Vol 1. Or at least the drills could have been moved to an appendix in Volume 1 so as not to swamp the exposition of key points.

   But despite the poor design and layout, the editing has clearly been meticulous. Typos and misprints can be disastrous when introducing a language to learners who are in no position to spot them, and they are pretty frequent on some of the other Tagalog primers on the market. But in this book I have yet to discover a single misprint, or indeed any error of any description.

   It would be great if this book could be given a thorough design makeover (including making the readings available in print once more) while retaining those high editorial standards. But even in its present unappealing guise, it's the best there is, by a long way.




2. I am very glad this is back in print, as an old dusty copy (sans the original reel-to-reel tapes) in my university library gave me good foundation in Tagalog. Personally, I love the drawings! So what if they are from the 1960's; the inspired me to learn Tagalog just as my old Hayden books inspired me to learn electronics: retro drawings are cool!
   
   If this is an exact reproduction of the original, it is helpful for teachers of Tagalog, as well as students. It makes it clear how to construct the different aspects (nominative, benefactive, locative, imperative, etc.) and actually names them in such a way that makes more sense than more recent books on Tagalog grammar (Aspillera, Ramos, Alejandro, for example).
   
   Today's language teachers might see the audiolingual apprach as a throwback, but drilling myself before spending a summer in the Philippines was worthwhile. The notes on stress and pronunciation are accurate, at least to my ears, and the example sentences have lines above them to guide the learner with sentence stress.
   
   I wish this book came with a CD, not an audiocassette, and encourage the publisher to get with the times. Other than that, the price is right for a complete first-year Tagalog learning system!



3. The book, as some would point out, has been published over two decades ago. However, apart from being culturally outdated, I would definitely applaud in its efficiency. Basic grammar, vocabulary and common phrases were tackled so well that I sadly learned that I would no longer talk behind my husband's back in Tagalog. :p (He is, though, very interested in language, so persistence played a huge part)
   
   Bottom line: The book offers great instruction; it presents a good structure of the language and is something I would definitely recommend, if the person learning does not mind the age of the publication date.



4. This Tagalog textbook is great for beginners and is so easy to understand that it can be used to teach yourself the language. It is very straight forward and gives the reader the information that they need to be able to succeed in becoming efficient in Tagalog.



5. This book is a disappointment to me. The book assmes a classroom situation. It assumes a teacher, tapes, and a laboratory. I have none of the above. There are no instructions at the beginning of a Unit. I would advise against buying this book unless you are enrolled in a Tagalog class.

5 comments about Modern Tagalog: Grammatical Explanations and Exercises for Non-Native Speakers.

1. Many people have reviewed this book as not being for begginers, on the contrary though its is a very good book for slightly learned begginers.
   
   The reason why people may have stated that it's not for begginers is because of the lingo in the book particularly on the chapters on Pronounciation and Sentence Expansion. Those are probrably the only two chapters that are seriously even difficult. If you have trouble with any other chapter either A) your not really interested in learning the language structure and getting your setences grammatically correct and understandable, or B) the slight use of linguistics terms is confusing, although that can be cured by simply using an "online dictionary". (I didn't know what transitive and intransitive meant but I do know.) For the most part most of the technincality of this book doesn't rise into real high complexity.
   
   This book is great because, it's concise, easy to read ,not to difficult to understand, and actually if you read closely you may notice some rules grammar-wise that you may not have been taught whic is why this is a great book. I use Modern Tagalog book with Basic Tagalog (which is not reccommended by me for slow begginers) because they complement each other well, in helping to improve the grammar.
   
   The only negatives of this book is that although it does reveal extra grammar information sometimes like in the section on "May/Mayroon" and "Naka" you may be left hanging just a little bit. Also, it's not as complex and in-depth into the language as I thought it was gonna go so that disappointed me.
   
   Great buy!



2. This is an excellent book for those of us who learn languages through a rules-based approach rather than the more common intuitive "use some common expressions and try to figure out why along the way" found in many books.
   
   On the other hand, if you always hated and never understood grammar and prefer to just dive in to everyday language, you'll probably prefer one of the other books.
   
   In either case, you'll probably want to remember that Teresita Ramos teaches proper Tagalog and some of the expressions/word choices in her books may not be the vernacular used on the streets of Makati.
   
   Ultimately however, if you have an analytical vice artistic mind and need to understand things from a mechanical framework, this is the best book available.



3. Be aware, this book is NOT FOR NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS! 80% or more of this book is in Tagalog. If your not a native speaker or don't know a lot of the language, best to steer clear of this title for now.



4. If you read the back cover of this book, it states that is is for the student that has advanced beyond the basic level... it is exactly what it states, a grammar book that was written to follow after Dr. Ramos' book Tagalog Structures. I find this book very useful in furthering my knowledge of Tagalog and would recommend it to any serious student of the language.



5. This book is not for self-teaching students, but for students attending a Tagalog course or taking private lessons with a tutor as there are no keys to exercices. This is a book for beginners with a couple of weeks' initiation period behind them. The term "advanced" used in the preface is puzzling because the level is elementary. The authors still ignore the system of accents devised for Tagalog about a century ago so that their students will have to waste a lot of time checking the proper stress patterns in a dictionary. A good didactic book ought to have all the proper accents.

1 comments about Tagalog Dictionary (Pali Language Texts: Philippines).

1. Excellent. A basic Tagalog/English dictionary. I used it when I was learning Tagalog among the Philippino people in the Bay Area. A complement to the two other books by Ramos. Great for basic interpretation and understanding Tagalog words, assuming one understands grammar and conjugation of verbs, etc.