Cafe Catalina

Almost 3 months into my job as an economic specialist, I got an additional role at work: Tagalog teacher for my boss.

As he will be based in Manila for 2 years, he is very keen on learning the language. He is married to a Filipina but she is from Cebu. I doubt she’d teach him Tagalog 😉 But he can already understand quite a bit of both Tagalog and Cebuano, which is pretty cool. I think what he wants to learn is proper construction and usage plus a whole lot more vocabulary that he can use on a daily basis.

I checked out the Filipino materials by the FSI. Unfortunately, the audio files are missing. Also, I went through the student text and some bits were outdated — which is not surprising because those things were made in the 1960s. Still, quite useful. I even use the French one as a supplement to my lessons.

Anyway, for this week, I will look for suitable books to use and build the lessons around them, then use FSI as a supplement.

I am a bit worried, though. Filipino is my native language, but I have not been trained to teach it. I took a Japanese teaching course at Nihongo Center and that is how I learned techniques for teaching. We were taught not only “what to teach” but also “how to teach”. I learned the subtleties of grammar and our teachers even delved a bit into comparative language analysis, comparing Japanese to other foreign languages.

Well, it looks like I need to do a bit of studying myself before I start my “classes” with my boss. I don’t want to disappoint, haha. I can do this! ファイト！！

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