NEW YORK—“Would you like to learn Filipino?” Ask a very young Filipino-American, and you will most likely draw a blank....
Unli call and text first came out in those large cell-phone company ads promoting an unlimited number of calls and texting. Soon the turo-turo also began to offer “unli rice.”
New York—As this city closed (who would have thought?) and braced itself for the fierce hurricane called Irene, a close...
Poetry, like a toothache, was a pain in school. Like Fr. Steinbugler, S.J. handing out Ds in third year high to us who failed to compose a poem modeled, measure for measure, on Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”
Arnel Valencia felt humiliated at school when he was barred from using the language he spoke at home, part of a decades-long pattern of linguistic destruction across the Philippines.
Public school teachers and their students are learning to speak more foreign languages, especially with the inclusion this year of Chinese, as part of the Department of Education’s program to bring widely used languages into the secondary education curriculum.
Anyone who was a child pre-World War II remembers the menfolk’s visits to one another’s homes. They enjoyed cigars or just conversation, sitting on sillas perezosas (lazy easy chairs) in the sala as if there was nothing ever urgent to do. If they were ilustrados (learned), they spoke in Spanish and all the kids around imbibed a smattering of it. “Si para si para buto ng sili!” we would mimic them.
“I do not want my friends to think I’m a genius.” Those were the words of a 14-year-old boy as he struggled to compose a letter as part of his school assignment.
I am sitting against in the bower near the driveway, and the fantails are noisily welcoming me back. The yellow flowers are in bloom and the red anthuriums peeping from the tips of their leaves. Abandoned are the signs on heavy stands that Lilli-Ann threatened to place outside the gate: No Parking; Bawal magtambay; Bawal magsabit ng T-shirt sa bakod; Bawal matulog sa bangketa.
The Tagalog that many Luzon provinces share have variations from region to region as I learned as a short-time resident of several places.
