Magandang araw po sa inyong lahat.

So as I'm sure many of you already knew, Alma's parents are from the Philippines. As you probably also already knew, I am kind of a geek for languages. I took French for years (and still retain a slight knowledge of it) and tried Russian in college, though I didn't make it beyond a quarter because five days a week at 9 am was just not happening. But I still remember some words from that, even, and I can pronounce printed Cyrillic. I also took a couple linguistics classes in college, and so can converse intelligently on the structures of languages I don't speak a word of. But I never got to actual fluency in another language.

Well, if I don't do it now, it's never going to happen - and there's no language that's quite as available to me at the present time as Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines. I discovered a podcast and accompanying blog that teach the language in pretty small, manageable chunks - I've gone through the first five lessons so far, which has pretty much just covered greetings and a few "time" words like kahapon, yesterday, and ngayon, right now, the latter of which has proven my most difficult pronunciation challenge so far. (The two main problems that have presented so far are the glottal stop, commonly used at the end of the modifier po, which indicates respect to the addressee, and the phoneme ng, treated as a single letter in Tagalog and a surpassingly unintuitive sound for an Anglophone, since it has an N-like sound but is produced at the other end of the mouth from the English N. English has velar consonants - K, G, and W - but their pronunciations are not so subtle as ng. And we do have the "ng" sound, in words like "ring," but we certainly don't begin words with it, and we pronounce the G in every case I can think of offhand.)

I probably shouldn't weigh you down with all the details ("Too late!!"), but suffice it to say that this should be interesting. I've never had native speakers at my disposal before - although it's kind of interesting because Alma's dad is not a native speaker; his first language is another of the many Filipino dialects, though he is certainly fluent in Tagalog. In that respect it's even more helpful, because he too knows what it's like to learn the language in a fashion other than just picking it up as a baby, although there's a lot less of a leap from Tagalog to other Filipino dialects than there is from Tagalog to English; at least the other dialects are in the same language family as Tagalog. At any rate, he's been a big help so far, and I get the feeling that her parents like that I'm interested in learning the language.

So it'll be a fun experiment, and hopefully more successful than my previous false start (which failed for two reasons - one, I was too embarrassed to use her parents as a resource, and two, the book I had was basically just a phrasebook and didn't break things down in the way that I find useful as a learning tool). I really would like to be fluent eventually, and I suggested to Alma that we could ask her parents to speak nothing but Tagalog around us for a while if I get to the point I'd like to be at, a way of learning by immersion. It might also be good for Alma, who understands Tagalog fairly comprehensively but can't speak it to any significant degree. It'd be pretty neat if eventually we could all sit around, playing mahjong and conversing in Tagalog.

(Oh, and the title of the post, if you're not Alma, means "Good day to you all." With politeness, since my parents read this.)