Teacher Mel
My co-copywriter who sits next to me in our little CW (Copywriting) cube has been asking me to teach him some Filipino words. He's asked how to say things like:
“Magandang umaga!”
“Maganda hapon!” I had to stress the accent on the HA- and told him that “haPON” meant Japanese. He asked what he just said meant, so I said, “beautiful Japanese.”
“Magandang gabi!”
“Kamusta ka?”
He has also learned popular Pinoy expressions:
“Hay nako!” Sounds like Heineken daw, but ending with "o". I had to specifically tell him not to put W at the end of hay "nakow", because in Filipino, we say O as in “awe” instead of “Oh.” He justified that he was having a hard time because in English, O is pronounced like that. Even the letter O is called "ow."
“Ay salamat!” He’s worked this out in a sentence already – “Ay salamat, it’s time to go home.” He said it so well, it sounded funny coming from a white guy. I was impressed!
Of course, his lessons won’t be complete without these:
“Puta**g i*a!” (he's heard about this before, and now already knows the short cut – tang-i… and the version with a “mo” at the end.) Because I hardly ever swear, saying these to him ever so slowly felt really weird.
“Punye*a” and its equivalent non-curse, “punyemas” is now also in his Filipino vocabulary.
At the end of our lesson on that day, he tried to make complete sentences out of his new words, and said with a smile:
“Magandang umaga! Puta*g ina mo. Kamusta ka?”
I definitely didn't see that coming.
As of this writing, our last lesson was “sige” and “talaga.” He scribbled those words down in his little post its, turned to me and said, “I wish I could teach you something, but you already know English!”
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Singit lang. Somehow, I feel like I should mention this here, for the sake of my fellow OFWs (or nagfe-feeling OFW) dito sa US.
Translate: Uminom ka ng gamot.
Drink medicine.
Right? Wrong.
You don’t really drink medicine, but you TAKE something.
“Take your meds.”“Did you take something already?”
Class dismissed.
posted by meL @ 9:10 AM
2 Comments:
I so loved this blog hehe. although i think for the wrong reason....remember all my cono mistakes when we started in up?!? for the longest time, i lost my super arte taglish whateverness....recently however, my clinical superviser pointed out the fact that i am (as she termed it) so-lasallista na! in my last therapy progress notes, i had inadvertently written words like "made kwento" and the like in it. HELLO!!!!!
hahahaha! aren't we a product of our environment? :) hihihi! we love you with or without your conyoness, pero alam mo, you can't ever be RIA without the conyo part. haha! mishu!
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