Hey everyone...I'm back and more serious than ever about becomin

@AMBoy Welcome back
If you really want to improve your Listening skills, check out the (relatively) new “Listening Practice” section of this website. If you haven’t seen it yet, it has over 100 Youtube videos with 27+ hours of video along with its transcribed text, and each word is clickable to the TLDC dictionary for easier translation.If you put in a couple hours with those videos, I promise you’ll see a big improvement in your listening skills. And these videos all use more “natural” speech than a lot of other learning materials, so you’ll be gaining the listening skills needed to talk to real people on the streets.I like the “I’d like to speak Filipino” books, too - they’re a solid base to work from, and I own the full set, too.

@TLDCAdmin Yes, I have the whole set too and they do seem to be really good because they are not written by foreigners for foreigners like most books seem to be and does not focus only on learning to converse.Yes, I've tried the listening videos, and they kinda disheartened me a bit. I live in the Philippines and I know they talk fast but those bloggers seem to be talking REALLY fast and all these weird sound effects kinda make it distracting. It might be too early for me I guess but I was starting to think I had a fair sized vocab and understanding but I keep finding reasons to prove me wrong lol. But I will keep at it.You guys are putting so much work in to this site, it's great, but what's the end game here? How will you make money? I'm actually astonished as how many new users are joining this site looking to learn Tagalog. In my real life experience in PH most foreigners are perfectly happy never learning it. However for me I find it a worthy challenge and long overdue (been here 7 years).I'm hopeful that with 14 hours a week (2hrs a day (6hrs with a native tutor, and 8 hours self study)) combined with trying to apply the language daily mostly through chat I can become fluent in a year or two at least in reading and writing. Even when I see things that make me feel that man, I will probably never be able to read or understand this, I just need to realize that I'm just not there yet. I'm sure my current level of understanding would have been hard to imagine before I arrived here, I just gotta keep at it and let things keep building over time. Any one else reading this....let's do this!!

Is this the "gusto kong magtagalog" set? I like it a lot, but it is out of my price range! The multi colored (white yellow blue etc) books? I eyed them up when I first moved here and declined as I couldn't justify the price. If I recall, they're a sentence pattern style book. They present new information over and over and help you internalize the patterns! I've always loved that style of L2 education.

@akosikoneho Yes, those are the ones. I got them on Lazada w/ the CD's all 4 was around $80 US. I think without the audio CD's they are a little cheaper, you can find them at National bookstore as well. I'm annoyed tho that at least one of the books was not the latest edition and this came straight from the self publisher on Lazada. If it comes from the source it should be the most recent edition in my opinion haha.

80 USD is no small investment! I do like the books but at 1k a pop they're high.

@AMBoy Yeah, it could be that your vocabulary is not quite there yet...there also the two "rewind" buttons on the video page to fine-tune your rewinding for this reason -- you should expect, especially in the beginning, to go over and over again, piece by piece, each part of the audio. In the beginning you should click every word to look up the definitions, even if you're 90% sure you already know it. Eventually you'll start picking up larger chunks and common verbal "tics" and phrases so you'll process it faster.BUT...my general advice is, that if you're really struggling on something in the language, you're probably jumping too far ahead and it's time to back up and work on the fundamentals more. The sweet spot is to study material that is challenging, but not frustrating.Do I need an end game? ; ) I'm building some of the tools I wish I had to learn the language, and leveraging some of the skills I have with my regular job...hopefully to help a bunch of others! Eventually I might hook up something like Patreon for people to show appreciation and they can get some acknowledgement in return for it on this site...but I don't feel like the site is where I want it to be yet. I'm lucky to have a good job where I can work on this on the side as a hobby.I know!...that is really weird to me. But I think there is a large group of people who really want to learn the language...at least a little bit. To me, it's a matter of respect...I want to have some facility with the language since I enjoy the country and culture so much. The language also gives some nice insights into the culture and people.This. 100%! Learning a language well is just really hard... Those "Learn Spanish In Two Weeks!" books are so deceptive...they're just a marketing gimmick. No one can do a language justice in that kind of time frame...It takes many, many hours of focused effort.@AMBoy Ouch...I don't remember paying that much for them...I think I got them used on US Amazon for ~$8 each.

@TLDCAdmin Yeah, some expats just don't get it and frankly I guess some of them just aren't capable anyway. I'll never get tired of watching the shock and joy that comes over the locals faces when they hear my speak Tagalog. It's a beautiful thing. It's also a funny thing, because then you can see them think "oh damn that means he heard everything we just said !!" lol. But over all they really appreciate it, I actually joke around some times saying that learning Tagalog might just save our life someday. You never know when getting that little bit of extra credibility might get you out of a dangerous situation. You had me thinking I was fool for a second so I checked Amazon again and yeah they are out of "stocks" as they would say here haha. 1K is a fair price for me, but if anyone wants to get started you probably really only need BOOK 2, the blue one. Thanks for all the hard work on this site, I can't imagine how much work has gone in to this, the content is so deep.