Learn How to Speak Tagalog

Do you want to learn how to speak Tagalog? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Tagalog is one of the major languages spoken in the Philippines. Tagalog originated with the “Tagalog” people that are from the area of Manila and the surrounding region.

The national language is “Filipino”. Filipino is strongly related to Tagalog, yet is supposedly distinct in that it uses words from other languages in the Philippines as well as from Spanish and English. You can think of the lessons here as Filipino lessons or Tagalog lessons.

Learn more about Tagalog/Filipino and learn some of the other major languages in the Philippines.

Headstart Philippines Reloaded

Below you will find links to the various lessons of the Headstart to the Philippines course originally published by the Foreign Language Center of the US Defense Language Institute. The course has been released to the public domain and is thus copyright free.

I transcribed the entire course and split up the long audio files into more manageable snippets. The smaller sized audios are split at logical locations to allow for repeated listening to specific segments. I also recreated part of lesson 2 that is missing from all known online copies of the course.

Each lesson has many smaller segments which are usually the exercises. I’ve created links at the bottom of each page of the lessons to other parts of the lesson. So, be sure to visit the bottom of the pages of the lessons to view the numeric links to all the other components of the lesson.

You can learn more about the original course and why I decided to use it on this site by reading this article.