Tagalog Tea Time: Learn with Kloe

Download Ling here ➡️ https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

Is rendang better than adobo? Monika from Indonesia joins me to compare Filipino and Indonesian food, and you’ll learn Tagalog and Indonesian words with every dish.

Filipino listeners, which dish should Monika try first? Indonesian listeners, which one should I try? Tell me in the comments or the Q&A.

Download Ling here ➡️ https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

“Why would I learn Tagalog? Everyone in the Philippines speaks English.”

I get this comment more than any other, so today I’m answering it properly. Can all Filipinos actually speak English? Why do so many of us speak it? And if your partner or your family speaks English, do you still need to learn Tagalog, Cebuano, or whatever they speak at home?

Most of us learned English in school. It became the language of the classroom, the office and the paperwork, and home kept its own language. You can get through a whole holiday in English. At your partner’s family table, though, English will always keep you a little bit of a guest.

In this episode:

• How many Filipinos really speak English
• Araling Panlipunan and how school split our languages
• Inglesero, Inglesera and the “nosebleed” joke
• Naiintindihan mo ba? (plus a little Cebuano)
• Ibang tao vs. hindi ibang tao: guest vs. family
• Kapwa, the word English can’t translate
• A practice dialogue for meeting your partner’s Tita

Download Ling to learn Tagalog ➡️ https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

Reposting one of our older videos today for our new listners!

Some feelings only exist in Tagalog. Gigil is the urge to squeeze something unbearably cute, like a chubby baby's cheeks. Tampo is the quiet sulking you do when someone hurts your feelings and you refuse to say why. English will hand you five words for each one and still miss.

In this episode Kloe walks through six Tagalog words that English borrows awkwardly or can't say at all, with stories from growing up in Manila that show you exactly when Filipinos reach for them. By the end you'll have words for feelings you have had your whole life and never had a name for.

Words in this episode: gigil, kilig, tampo, lihi, kulob, bahala na.

Download Ling here: https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

This episode covers the difference between "Bisaya" and "Cebuano" and which word to use, six everyday words compared side by side, the false friends that trip up learners (langgam, gamot, palit, and one you'll have to look up yourself), the 1937 national language decision and why comprehension between the two languages only runs one direction, Kloe's honest answer on which one you should learn, and the same short conversation performed twice, once in Tagalog and once in Cebuano.

Download Ling to learn Tagalog: https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

Before you learn how to say "go" in Manila, learn how to say stop.Six Tagalog survival phrases for visiting the Philippines — and what each one tells you about how Filipinos treat the person in front of them. You'll call a stranger your older brother before you ask him anything. You'll ask a vendor for mercy instead of a discount. You'll say goodbye by telling someone to be careful.

Download Ling to learn Tagalog: https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

Tagalog is not the national language of the Philippines. Filipino is. And if that sentence just confused you, you're in extremely good company — it's one of the most-asked questions about the language.

Kloe breaks down the difference: where the name "Tagalog" actually comes from (it's not what you think), the 1937 government decision that started the confusion, why Cebuano and Ilocano speakers pushed back hard against it, and what actually separates Tagalog from Filipino in everyday speech.

There's also a quick quiz partway through — three sentences, and you decide whether each one is Tagalog or Filipino. Most people can't tell. There's a very good reason for that.

In this episode:

What "Tagalog" literally means

The quiz: Tagalog or Filipino?

1937 and the decision that started everything

Spanish and English inside modern Filipino

So are they the same language or not?

Tagalog Tea Time is also on YouTube, where this episode comes with maps, graphics, and Kloe's actual tea. Search "Ling Learn Languages."

Download Ling here ➡️ https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

In 1898 the United States bought the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars. Filipinos had already declared their independence that June. Nobody asked them.

Kloe, born and raised in Manila, walks through the forty-eight years of American occupation that followed — the Treaty of Paris, a war that killed an estimated two hundred thousand Filipino civilians and is barely taught in American schools, and the shipload of teachers who arrived in 1901 and replaced three hundred years of Spanish with English in about forty.

Then she traces what survived. The word for American that quietly became the word for any foreigner. Army surplus jeeps that turned into the most recognisably Filipino object in the world. A joke Filipinos invented to tap out of an English conversation without losing face. And why the Philippines celebrates independence on June 12, not on the day America agreed to hand it over.

Tagalog Tea Time covers the things that are hardest to learn from a textbook or an app. The previous episode covered the British occupation of Manila.

Learn Tagalog here ➡️ https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/s7y8y7e8

Filipinos have three complete number systems, and they switch between all of them without thinking about it. Native Tagalog, Spanish-derived, and English — each one has its own territory.

Kloe breaks down how counting in Tagalog actually works: why isa, dalawa, tatlo lives alongside uno, dos, tres, why 333 years of Spanish rule left numbers behind but not the grammar, and the unwritten rules for which system to use when you're telling time, haggling at the market, or reading out a phone number. Plus the mistakes learners make when they default to the wrong one.

Learn Tagalog here: https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

In the 1540s, Burma invaded Siam — and warriors from Luzon were fighting on both sides of it. Portuguese chroniclers called them the Lucoes: Tagalog and Kapampangan seafarers from Manila Bay who traded across Southeast Asia, made their own firearms, and were hired by rival kings — decades before the Spanish arrived in the Philippines.

Kloe unpacks this forgotten chapter of precolonial Philippine history through four Tagalog words: Lucoes, the name outsiders gave these warriors; mandirigma (warrior), from digma, war; bayani (hero), in its older, communal sense tied to bayanihan; and bayaran — paid, bought, a mercenary. Were our ancestors heroes, or hired blades? The language holds both answers at once.

New episodes every Thursday.

Learn Tagalog here: https://ling-app.onelink.me/Ue3y/q4211fss

Can the language you speak — or the one you lost — be a political statement? Kloe and Michael compare two passports, two colonial histories, and two very different relationships with a mother tongue.

In this episode of Tagalog Tea Time, Kloe (Filipino, raised in Manila) and Michael from the Ling team (Sri Lankan, raised in Dubai) get into how colonialism reshaped the languages they grew up around. They cover the pre-colonial Baybayin script the Philippines nearly lost, why English became a marker of class in both countries, the Spanish and American occupations of the Philippines, Sri Lanka's Sinhala–Tamil divide, and whether reclaiming a heritage language is resistance, nostalgia, or simply knowledge.

Ling is built on teaching non-dominant, heritage languages — Tagalog, Cebuano, Sinhala, Tamil, and dozens more that other apps skip.

Prefer to watch? This episode is also on YouTube (Ling Learn Languages), where you can see the passports, the Baybayin script, and the full conversation.

Poll: Do you think language is political? Vote yes or no.