After the Cyrillic alphabet, Tagalog: why Filipino brought my passion for languages to the next level

The importance of grasping a bit of the local language even as a tourist...

A last memorable point from that time is that during the tour in Russia, as I mentioned in the previous episode, I became a sort of mascot. I was not only the youngest (which is not surprising in a group tour), but I was the only one who could read some signs at least.

It was very relevant at that time! I was back in Russia in 2017, and nobody wanted to talk in English, so imagine it 13 years earlier. I remember the most useful word I could read when we were somewhere and had some time off without the guide: vykhod! Exit!

A new chapter

Anyway, let’s go back to Italy: my primary school has finished and…

And?

Secondary school had to kick off.

I had gone to a Catholic private primary school.

At the end of those 5 years, I was really done with that environment.

Many of my classmates wanted to meet again as many people as possible later in the new school.

For me, well, it was quite the opposite. I really wanted to go to a public school. I was sick with religious stuff all day long.

The foreign classmates

The most striking difference at that time was that in the private school, there were no immigrants.

I remember going to the school sometime before the start to see the list of the people in my class. I was super excited at seeing the names of foreigners on that list! I had never had any contact with them. I just remembered that I liked talking to foreign children on vacation ("talking" is a big word, given my almost non-existing English).

When school started, though, I didn't have much contact with the migrants.

There was a sort of undeclared apartheid between the two groups: Italians with Italians and foreigners with foreigners.

In the first months, I recall a terrible sense of boredom with my compatriots. It was frustrating. I was becoming less and less sociable.

I mean: what a deal, you want to get rid of your old acquaintances and you find yourself bored to the bone - and without real contact with the most interesting group in the school!

It was like this until when something happened. Another one of the most relevant experiences of my life.

From the Philippines with l...anguages?

A girl, Cecilia, came into my class from the Philippines in the last months of the first year of secondary school.

Problem: she couldn’t speak Italian, but her English was very good.

For us, well, it was the other way around: Italians with crappy English.

For some reason, my English was a bit better than the others. We got closer to each other. We are still friends nowadays, almost 20 years later. My English was a bit better, but not too much, the conversations weren’t easy at all.

One day, during a break, the topic of her native language came up: I remember I had not understood what she was talking about.

To show some interest, I asked her to teach me something about this "thing" she called “Tagalog”. What was the answer? She taught me how to say “what’s your name?” - and I still remember it! Anong pangalan mo? 

That moment really unlocked something.

I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s a bit like as if with Russian and Cyrillic, I started having a glimpse of what was expecting me, but the Tagalog language really allowed me to fully open the doors of this beautiful world and more.

Tagalog was important because it was a language sufficiently out of the average range of idioms that one would usually learn.

A long discovery journey

Starting from there, I discovered the universe of language families, which I had no clue about, of course. I basically had a tour of Asia through the idioms spoken there, because it was the continent I felt most attracted to. It was like a journey from the Philippines back to Europe.

First, I started reading and getting interested in the Maleo-Polynesian languages. In Milan, I bought some books about Tagalog. Thanks to her never-ending patience, I also learned to write a bit. At least it was enough when we were texting each other. It was amazing. Unfortunately, in the end, I have never learned to speak it properly and go beyond some sentences here and there.

But, I was so fond of learning even those little things that I still remember them now after all this time.

The books are still in my room. I will not get rid of them until I will have learned to speak it for real. Definitely, it is one of the things I want to do in my life.

Also for this episode, I would like to share a website that was another dear partner in crime for those years: http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/. It is a lovely website of the North Illinois University, whose layout hasn’t changed since then ahaha but back in 2005-2006 it was really a treasure.