Almost every day I am learning a new word in Tagalog, one ot the two official languages of the Filipinos aside from English. One of the first words I can remember learning was ‘bulaklak’ = flower.
I have learned to say good morning = ‘magandang umaga’ and good afternoon = ‘magandang hapon’. Good evening = ‘magandang gabi’. And I also learned some other things like: ‘salamat’ = thank you and ‘maraming salamat’ which is thank you very much.

Today, while watching the news on TV a commercial was shown for a pain killer. In it was a word to express how someone is feeling when very much in pain: excruciating pain (that’s how my wife Flor tried to explain it to me). The image showing: an almost naked man stooped and in severe pain holding his head (why almost naked?, I don’t know).
The word shown on screen was “nakakapamaluktot“. I saw it and tried to pronounce it properly but broke my tongue on it a few times. I had to write it down and try to read it again. I’ve tried it many times and still I am not able to say the word properly. Maybe too many vowels in it. ;-)
Tagalog has many words like this one. It seems they combine two or more words together into one new word. That’s the reason that there are so many very long words.
In other words they are repeating some vowels a few times like the above mentioned ‘bulaklak’.
Sometimes it is difficult to say those words (at least for me, a foreigner).

Writing about this commercial suddenly reminds me of an other but funny commercial where I learned some Tagalog:
‘Zipper mo bukas’ which means: your fly is open!
See the commercial. There’s no further translation needed to understand it.

I will try to keep my readers informed about my progress in learning Tagalog (which will go very slowly, I can assure you!). Tagalog is a complicated language grammatically. And the difficult to pronounce words…….
It might take years to learn this language. Or am I too lazy to learn it faster ???