What scares you the most?
For as long as I can remember, I never did like speaking in Tagalog. Maybe I did up until I was 10 years old and still very confident, but somewhere along the way, I felt self-conscious. I never could get the accent right, and I lacked the necessary speaking vocabulary.
Someone asked me once, “Can you understand what I’m saying?”
(I’m even too chicken to write the question in Tagalog, which was the original language by the speaker.:-p)
My reaction to that was just to smile and say, “Yes, don’t worry, I can understand everything you’re saying to me…”
Now, listening to and understanding is quite simple, really. Tagalog is a fairly easy enough language to understand, certain words are lifted from dialects I’m familiar with.
Talking, and speaking it? Now, that’s a different story. Being expected to converse in Filipino makes me break out in a cold sweat. Lol… It gives me a bit of anxiety, and more often than not, what happens is that I talk back in English, or I start thinking in Hiligaynon (which is totally far out, I know. haha) OR…I just nod my head and smile. :-p
Trust me, the possibility of embarrassing myself weighs heavy in my case. Maybe it’s not my fault, maybe it’s just the way circumstances have presented themselves. My father and his siblings studied in Manila…they can speak Tagalog without any accent… But we don’t speak the language at home. Most of the time, of course, the lingua franca of my home is basically, Cebuano and English. Ask anyone from here, speaking in English is more common than speaking the national language, almost.
And I don’t watch a lot of Tagalog movies.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I love the language. My anxiety is from a deep-rooted fear of making a mistake and embarrassing myself in front of people. Admittedly, the way they portray Cebuanos, or people from the provinces speaking Tagalog is that of a very coarse, not highly educated individual speaking in a rough tone, butchering all the words. In short, it becomes funny slapstick for some (even if it isn’t) and I don’t want to be labeled as someone who talks like that.
And so, I shut up most of the time. Or if I don’t, I speak in English, which feels like more comfortable and familiar.
I like listening to people who can speak Tagalog flawlessly. It is almost as melodious as Hiligaynon… It’s fairly amusing, actually. It is pretty simple a language, and is considerably more familiar, which is quite funny that I am more keen on learning French and Japanese, when in fact, I can’t even master my own.
