Modern Tagalog: Grammatical Explanations and Exercises for Non-Native Speakers

This is an excellent book for those of us who learn languages through a rules-based approach rather than the more common intuitive "use some common expressions and try to figure out why along the way" found in many books. On the other hand, if you always hated and never understood grammar and prefer to just dive in to everyday language, you'll probably prefer one of the other books. In either case, you'll probably want to remember that Teresita Ramos teaches proper Tagalog and some of the expressions/word choices in her books may not be the vernacular used on the streets of Makati. Ultimately however, if you have an analytical vice artistic mind and need to understand things from a mechanical framework, this is the best book available.

I bought this book in the Philippines some time ago and I have found it to be very informative and useful. It contains lots of info!

I read this book for a class taught by herself at the University of Hawaii. This is a good book for looking at the structure of Tagalog. It is a bit technical goes into linguistic structure of Tagalog (now officially called "Filipino") For non-native speakers, the pre-requisite for this book is at least two years (or four semesters) of combined introductory and intermediate Tagalog, with these, this book shouldn't be that hard. It is full of exercises,course content, and explanations that a gramaphobe would like. Most of the classmates I took this class for were native speakers and most are very bright and she constantly bounced the material in the book with what the students said and what they know which was quite fun.

This book is just what it says. Basic grammatical explinations. For more advanced learners of Tagalog it could be used as a very useful tool to understanding how the language works. Begginers will probably find it very difficult to use. It has indepth explinations for all the grammatical rules, however a working vocabulary in Tagalog is helpful. Many of the examples are not translated into English.