The ROI of learning Tagalog - was it worth it?

[hitch22]

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ROI (Return on Investment) is defined as the ratio of amount (money, knowledge, professional advancement) gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount invested (time and money).

This is a question to Cebuanos who have finished their University degrees and are deep into their professional careers. We spent years memorizing our talasalitaan and balarila and all those parts of sentences like pangatnig, simuno, panaguri, etc. From a PRACTICAL standpoint, what has been the useful benefit of gaining Tagalog fluency? What has been it's ROI? Name a scenario where Tagalog literacy enabled you smooth access to cutting-edge knowledge and thus advanced your careers or enhanced your skillsets or knowledge-base. And if you've found two technical books or scientific literatures, one written in Tagalog and another written in English, which one would fasttrack your mastery of that skill?

We can romanticize about Tagalog and philosophize about nationalism and identity. But to confront the cold hard reality, you know that at the end of the day, you need to make a good living for yourself and your family.

I'll leave you with this great insight from a legendary figure in Southeast Asia named Lee Kuan Yew, considered by Western intellectuals as the Asian "Winston Churchill". Now some of you may not like him, for one reason or another...but I dare say one cannot ignore him when he speaks. I find deep practical wisdom in his response to this question from the interviewer. I think a pragmatist like him doesn't come along very often.

Q: “When you decided to close the Chinese stream education and the college, what was the rationale behind that and do you ever regret doing that?”

Mr Lee: “No, I regret not doing it faster because politically, if there’d been a violent electoral protest in the next elections...because they’re so wedded to the idea that language means, culture means, life means everything. But I’m a pragmatist and you can’t make a living with the Chinese language in Singapore. The first duty of the government is to be able to feed its people, to feed its people in a little island. There’s no hinterland and no farming, you have got to trade and you have got to do something to get people buy your goods or services or get people to come here and manufacture themselves, export, ready-made markets and multinationals which I stumbled on when I went to Harvard for a term in 1968 and I said 'Oh, this could solve my unemployment problem.'

So we brought the semiconductors factories here and one started. The whole herd came, and we became a vast centre for production of computers and computer peripherals. But they all speak English...multinationals from Japan, Europe, whatever European country they came from...they all speak English. So Chinese-educated were losing out and they were disgruntled because they got the poorer jobs and lesser pay. So eventually our own Members of Parliament who were Chinese-educated and graduates from the Chinese university said 'Okay, we have got do something. We’re ruining these people’s careers.'

By that time, the university was also losing its good students and getting bum students. Because they took in poor students, they graduated them on lower marks and so the degree became valueless. When you applied for a job with a Chinese university degree, you hide your degree and produce your school certificate. So I tried to change it from within. The Education Minister was Chinese-educated and English-educated and had to convert it from within, because most of the teachers have American PhDs. So they (teachers) did their thesis...in English, but they’ve forgotten their English, as they’ve been teaching in Chinese. It couldn’t be done. So, I merged them with the English-speaking university. Great unhappiness and dislocation for the first few years but when they graduated, we put it to them: 'Do you want your old university degree or you want English university degree?' All opted for the English university degree. That settled it.”

[yanong_banikanhon]

Naa gihapon siya'y gamit.

Kun manarbaho ang usa ka fresh graduate sa manila, inenglis tuod ang interview pero sa workplace, tinagalog ang sinultihan. Kun di ka kabalo'g tinagalog, unsa man imo buhaton, mag-inenglis?

Kun makahimamat ka og mga pinoy/pinay nga dili bisaya abroad, salikwaot man pud kun pulos lang mo inenglis. Tinagalog gyud ang inyong pilion nga common language.

Busa sa akong opinyon, duna gihapon practikal nga gamit ang national language. Dili lang siguro pud pasobraan ang units ani sa college kay kasagaran sa ato makasabot ug makasulti na man daan sa tagalog, thanks sa media nga nakaabot sa halos tanang suok sa pilipinas.

[hitch22]

^^^Agree with your points, especiall when you said:

Dili lang siguro pud pasobraan ang units ani sa college

Mao bitaw ROI ang atong gi-hisgutan.

My contention is not that there is NO benefit. My contention is that we're only getting a FRACTION of the benefit, compared to the amount of time, effort, money invested in learning all the nuances of Tagalog.

Ingon ani. Ask yourself this. Have you noticed that there are lots of Tagalog words and sentence structures that you learned in school which you never really used in the real world?

For example: When you talk to a Tagalog,
Do you use the word "classroom" or "silid-aralan"?
Do you use the word "notebook" or "kuwaderno"?
Do you use the word "square" or "parisukat"?
Do you say "Sino ang guro mo sa agham?" or "Sino'ng teacher mo sa science?"
What's the use of inventing the Tagolg word "salumpwit" when "silya" (from Spanish word "silla") is more widely used?
Have you ever used the word "dalawampu't dalawa" to refer to the number "22"? Or do you use "bente dos" (again from the Spanish word)?

I hope it's getting clearer to you what I mean. We all learn practical Tagalog outside of school. Practical Tagalog isn't even pure tagalog. Somewhere in between a sentence, you usually sneak in some English or Spanish words...so it doesn't sound awkward. This reminds me of a funny moment inside a jeepney when a Cebuano friend of mind wanted to drop off at the next stop; he says "Ginoo, hinto!"

When a dyed-in-the-wool, Bisaya-speaking Cebuano tries to apply what he learns about Tagolog from school, for the first time, to the real world, what usually happens? He sounds very awkward and funny, right?

Mao na pasabot nako sa ROI...sa pag-apply pa lang daan sa natun-an sa usa ka Cebuano sa eskwelahan, failure na gani...kay most will feel so half-baked about what they learned in School.

My point is to say that we should re-think how Tagalog should be taught in schools, taking a more practical approach...perhaps more as a conversational language course rather than in a rigorous technical approach.

[niehrx]

amen to that. mao nga dapat wala na Filipino subject sa academic. atay.

[luke0917]

matud pa ni Jose Rizal na "Ang hindi mgmahal sa sariling wika, ay higit pa sa malansang isda". hehehe.

[ad_dur]

i find that subject irrelevant ... we could somehow learned Chinese, Nippongo or Spanish ...

[pinoy_09]

Hitch, you can say the same with English literature and History (unless of course you are an English or History major).

[LeeLeePot]

para sako beneficial man xa...at least the kids will know nga naa pud diay tai proper grammar sa tagalog (considering nga mao ni ang natl language YATA)..makabalo ang mga bata nga naay filipino counterpart ang subject,predicate, parts of speech...so on!

sa states man gne, ambot kung ginatudlo ba ang english peo i think itudlo jud dapat to sa ila masking first language na nila na kai naay ubang kano nga wrong gramming kaayo mudeliver ug sentence oi! maglabad akong ulo usahay mubasa sa ilang mga faxed letters.

murag gamay ra man jud if not wla jud nato maapply atong mga gipangtuon sa klase with what we are working on right now but i guess this all boils down to appreciating something your teachers have lived up to pass on rather than wala jud kai natun-an...

[KiMsOnitE]

Just Food for thought from my nursery kid's class :

Dogs = Bark

Cat = meow

Americans = English

China = mandarin

Philippines = not anymore filipino (tagalog or visayan) but english??

Having tagalog as part of our curriculum keeps us in check with our heritage. It identifies us uniquely with the world which is ever vastly expanding.

Your identity and your success go hand in hand. Many people sacrifice their identities by not doing what they really want to do. And that's why they're not successful.


Just my two bit sentiments.

[mark_012590]

And yet another Tagalog - Cebuano debate.