Teach Yourself Tagalog

This is a really great book and it has a good basis for what a new learner of the language would need, especially someone who is planning on traveling to the Philippines. The only thing that I have a hard time with is how fast they speak on the CDs, but that does make it more like it would be like in a real life situation.

Quite a good book to get you started learning your new language! The CDs are very helpful and really give you the edge to learning pronunciation. The only drawback to this book is that it is hard to know the pronunciation for the words not spoken on the CDs. However, the explanations on the uses of the words and topics are quite helpful and easy to understand. Also there are some good explanations of Tagalog expressions, as well as some explanations of the Pilipino culture. If you want lots of exercises you might want to get another book in adition to this one. However, they CDs make this book a very good tool in learning the language. I recommend buying the Hippocrene Standard Dictionary Tagalog-English/English-Tagalog by Carl R. Galves Rubino