As mentioned in the previous post, Tagalog is formal Filipino, but in the following posts, we will use Tagalog and Filipino interchangeably to mean informal or conversational Tagalog.
Filipinos are good English speakers and usually mixed their language with English, so "Hello" and "Hi" are understood by almost everyone. These words are usually used by acquaintance when seeing each other. In addition to "Hi" and "Hello", here are a few greetings that can get you started.
Filipinos are good English speakers and usually mixed their language with English, so "Hello" and "Hi" are understood by almost everyone. These words are usually used by acquaintance when seeing each other. In addition to "Hi" and "Hello", here are a few greetings that can get you started.
Good afternoon - Magandang hapon
Good evening - Magandang gabi
Explanation
The words umaga, hapon, and gabi mean morning, afternoon, and evening respectively. The word magandang with root word maganda literally means "beautiful." The word magandang is a contraction of "maganda ang", where ang means "the." Therefore, the full form of "Magandang umaga" is really "Maganda (beautiful) ang (the) umaga (morning)" or "The morning is beautiful."
Filipinos usually say "Kumusta ka?" (How are you?) or often times "Kumusta?" omitting ka (you) when they see each other. Persons who have not seen each other for a while usually say "Anong balita?" or "What's new?" when seeing each other. Anong with root word "ano" means "what" and "balita" means "news."
