The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University maintains SEAsite, which hosts a number of Southeast Asian language learning resources. When I first began my Tagalog learning journey, this was one of the first resources I found on the web. This was back sometime in 1998-1999 so, as you can see, the site has been around for a long time.
The Tagalog SEAsite is a fairly complete tool for beginners and perhaps early intermediate learners. It has a number of resources, some of those being an online Tagalog dictionary, lessons grouped according to themes, and cultural essays. My interest was always in the grammar, not to try to understand the complexities of the language but to understand the building blocks of creating words/phrases/sentences.
The Tagalog SEAsite grammar was useful to me as a beginner, although at the time I didn't really understand enough about grammar in general to fully appreciate it. After having experience with other Tagalog learning books, the Tagalog SEAsite grammar seems to provide the typical grammatical content that other resources provide. The nice thing about this grammar is that it is online and any particular grammatical concept is fairly easy to find.
That said, I did not (and do not) make frequent use of the grammar or site. For one, the presentation does not facilitate easy reading. It is not engaging either. The regular text seems a bit small and webpage background feels is similar in color to highlighted words that they get drowned out. The charts, however, present grammatical information/concepts nicely.
Ultimately, I think the Tagalog SEAsite page is worth exploring for a learner of Tagalog. I didn't find it so useful but others might. The site appears to get updates every so often so it might worth returning to the site occasionally to see if any updates make the resource more useful.
The Tagalog SEAsite is a fairly complete tool for beginners and perhaps early intermediate learners. It has a number of resources, some of those being an online Tagalog dictionary, lessons grouped according to themes, and cultural essays. My interest was always in the grammar, not to try to understand the complexities of the language but to understand the building blocks of creating words/phrases/sentences.
The Tagalog SEAsite grammar was useful to me as a beginner, although at the time I didn't really understand enough about grammar in general to fully appreciate it. After having experience with other Tagalog learning books, the Tagalog SEAsite grammar seems to provide the typical grammatical content that other resources provide. The nice thing about this grammar is that it is online and any particular grammatical concept is fairly easy to find.
That said, I did not (and do not) make frequent use of the grammar or site. For one, the presentation does not facilitate easy reading. It is not engaging either. The regular text seems a bit small and webpage background feels is similar in color to highlighted words that they get drowned out. The charts, however, present grammatical information/concepts nicely.
Ultimately, I think the Tagalog SEAsite page is worth exploring for a learner of Tagalog. I didn't find it so useful but others might. The site appears to get updates every so often so it might worth returning to the site occasionally to see if any updates make the resource more useful.
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