My first encounter with Tagalog verbs (aka Pain)

Hello, there! Welcome to a somewhat more cohesive and purposeful entry for my Genius project! Last time that I made an entry, I had almost no idea what my project was going to be about. But a few days later, I decided that I wanted to learn Tagalog to better communicate with my Tagalog-speaking relatives.I know that one of them has a pretty tough time speaking in English, and I assume that the rest would prefer to speak in their native language, so I'm just giving it a shot and seeing where it all goes.

Over the past few months, I've made some progress. I bought this Tagalog-learning app that has, like, 105 lessons on it; took tons of notes on Tagalog grammar; made study sets on Quizlet; and made two videos that documented my progress and pronunciation. Still, I'm not happy with the way that I've been keeping track of what I've learned. I found that I tend to forget everything the next day, so starting from now, I'm going to make daily entries on Blogger to use as future reference. Plus, if anyone else is interested in learning Tagalog or just wants to see my failure, I'm sure this'll be of some use to you.

Anyway, one of the first things that I learned about was Tagalog verbs. I wanted to understand the different conjugations and tenses, so I went online and found a lot of resources for it. All of them told me that Tagalog verbs don't need to be conjugated to fit the subjects, but should still fit the verb tense. So for example, if I said something like "I/you/he/she/they/we walk", all of that would be correct. I just have to change the word "walk" to fit past, present, or future tense.

So when I read that, I was like, "Oh, okay. This'll be super easy." But hahahahahaha. No.

Apparently, there are four different types of verbs in Tagalog which could also be separated into two separate groups. The first group is called Actor Focus Verbs, and are made up of -mag and -um verbs. The second is called Object Focus Verbs, and are made up of -in and -i verbs. These two groups follow different sentence structures, and each of their verb types follow different conjugations. (You can find out what type a verb is by looking at its infinitive form.)

Actor Focus Verbs follow this structure:


And have their verbs conjugated in this way:





And Object Focus verbs follow this structure:


And have their verbs conjugated in this way:





Okay, okay. Still not that complicated so far, right? All you got to do is look at the infinitive form to find out which verb type something is, conjugate it accordingly, and place it in the right structure, right? Hahahahahaahahahahahahhaaaa. No.

The infinitive isn't listed as the most basic form of  the verb in most online resources. Instead, they list the root of the verb which really give you no clue on what the infinitive form/verb type is. So if you have to guess that, you'll have to guess the conjugation, and you'll most likely get it wrong. The only advice that I've gotten so far is to just memorize it all as I go along.

Yeah. Tagalog hurts.

Here's the source of all those pretty little diagrams: All Things Tagalog! There's a whole series on conjugating verbs, so that'll be helpful for anyone who'd like to share my pain.