Basic sentences for Tagalog

Tagalog puts the verb first. "Kumain ako" is literally "ate I", and once you stop trying to rearrange it into English order, a lot of the language stops feeling difficult.

These twelve sentences cover a first conversation end to end: greeting someone, saying who you are and where you are from, admitting you did not catch that, and buying something.

Kumusta comes from the Spanish "¿cómo está?". Tagalog carries a few hundred years of Spanish in it, which is a gift if you already speak any.

Po is the single most useful word here. It carries no meaning of its own: you drop it into a sentence to show respect, and you use it with anyone older than you, anyone serving you, and anyone you have just met. Leaving it out is not rude exactly, but putting it in is immediately warmer.

Ako si means "I am", and it goes in front of a name. Taga- is a prefix meaning "from", stuck onto a place.

These three do more work than anything else on this list. Most people will switch to English the moment you use them, since the Philippines is one of the most bilingual countries in the world. If you want to keep practising, follow them with "pwede Tagalog?".

Magkano is the word you will use most often in a market. The answer comes back in pesos, usually fast.

The pattern underneath all of this is worth seeing once. English puts the doer before the action; Tagalog puts the action first and the doer after it.

Notice siya in the second row: Tagalog has one pronoun for he and she. Gender is not marked, which is one less thing to get wrong.

Leaving po out is the mistake everyone warns you about. Putting it everywhere is the one nobody mentions. Used with someone your own age it does not read as polite, it reads as distant, or as a joke, the way calling a friend sir would in English. The rule that holds: older than you, serving you, or just met, po goes in. A colleague you have lunch with every day, it comes out.

The same split runs through yes. Oo is the ordinary yes. Opo is the respectful one, and it is not optional with an elder. Answering a grandmother with oo is the single most noticeable thing a learner does wrong, and it is noticeable because Filipino children are corrected on it from the age of about three.

And ka is singular. Kumusta ka? is fine with a peer. With anyone you are giving po to, it becomes kayo, which is the plural you used as a respectful singular, exactly as French does with vous.

The Philippines has well over a hundred languages, and Tagalog is the first language of roughly a quarter of the country. Filipino, the national language, is Tagalog-based, so what is on this page will be understood everywhere. It will not always be what people are speaking to each other.

In Cebu, most of the Visayas and much of Mindanao, that language is Cebuano. Kumusta crosses over. The time-of-day greetings do not.

In Metro Manila the everyday register is Taglish, switching between Tagalog and English inside a single sentence. This is not sloppiness or a sign that someone wants to practise English on you. It is how the city talks, and matching it is more natural than insisting on unmixed Tagalog.

Hello po answers the phone, and it is the clearest illustration of how po works: the greeting is English, the politeness is Tagalog, and nobody finds the combination strange.

Texting keeps the honorifics and abandons almost everything else. The Philippines spent years as the highest-volume texting country in the world and the abbreviations that came out of that are still in use, so salamat turns up as slmt and kumusta as kmsta. Po survives every one of these contractions intact, which tells you how load-bearing it is.

Kumusta ka, mabuti naman salamat, and po on the end of everything will get you through a first conversation politely. Add hindi ko maintindihan for when it goes fast, which it will.

After that it is mostly exposure. Photograph the jeepney signs, the sari-sari store shelves and the menus, and let the vocabulary arrive with the place it came from already attached.