Yellow! I was born and raised here in the Philippines. However,

Nice “TED Talk.” I am American and have only been to your country twice. One time I was at a Bo’s coffee at a shopping center in Binyan, and I saw this cook walking across the lawn speaking completely 100% American English, but he was Filipino. That was cool and I remember the friend I was with reminding me that the Philippines is not uniform in its people’s languages and backgrounds.

I'm curious how easily you pick up conversational verb affixes. By far the most common way of learning is by convention in total immersion. You missed a bunch of immersion opportunities but I would guess you got enough incidental exposure that you have some intuition for the proper verb affix? But I also guess you feel a fair amount of the frustration that us non-immersion learners share as well?"Spoken dollar" ka daw....ssooooo slang, sayang! I hear that too much. :D