Mahal kita
I love you. Two words, and the grammar inside them is a neat introduction to how Tagalog packs a sentence.
What is inside it
Mahal is the love part. Kita is not you: it is a single pronoun that means I to you, doing the work of two English words at once. Tagalog has a small set of these fused pronouns and kita is the one everybody learns first.
Which is why you do not say mahal ko ikaw. It is not wrong so much as clumsy, the way I do love you is grammatical English that nobody says without a reason.
The other mahal
The same word means expensive. Both senses come from the idea of being precious, so a person is mahal for the same reason a handbag is. You will hear the money sense far more often, usually with a groan attached.
| Rank | Tagalog | What it does | Register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 48 | Ang mahal naman!Play | That's so expensive! | casual |
| 16 | Magkano?Play | How much is it? | neutral |
| 47 | Pwede bang tumawad?Play | Can I haggle?Fine in a market, not in a shop with price tags. | neutral |
What people actually say
- Mahal din kita, I love you too. Din means also.
- Mahal ko kayo, to more than one person, which is how it is said to family.
- Miss kita, I miss you, borrowing the English verb whole, which is extremely common.
- Ingat, take care, which between Filipinos does a lot of the work that saying something warmer would do in English.
| Rank | Tagalog | What it does | Register |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | Ingat!Play | Take careHow you end a goodbye. Literally 'be careful', used the way 'take care' is. | neutral |
| 23 | SayangPlay | What a waste / too badFor a missed chance or a wasted thing. There is no clean English single word for it. | neutral |
The frequency ordering on this site is an informed estimate, not a corpus count. There is no published frequency count for conversational Tagalog, so it prints a rank and never a percentage. When a real count exists, the order changes and this line changes with it.
It teaches Tagalog as spoken around Manila, which is not the same thing as Filipino and is not the whole country. Cebuano and Ilocano are different languages, not accents.
Nothing is drilled until a native speaker has checked it. What has been checked, by whom, and what is still owed is written down on the sources page.
- Phrase lookupSearch a word, see what lives next to it.
- Why Duolingo has no TagalogThe real reason, and what to do instead.
- Basic Tagalog phrasesThe ones you will actually hear, in frequency order, with audio.
- All the phrasesThe whole list this app drills, on one page.
- ang, ng, saNine cells that decide the shape of every Tagalog sentence.
- The pronoun gridTwenty-one cells, three cases, and the two words for we.
- Pronunciation and stressWhy buhay and buhay are different words, and how to hear it.
- Where this comes fromEvery source, every licence, and who checked the Tagalog.
- Tagalog vs FilipinoDifferent names, mostly the same language. What actually differs.
- Is Tagalog hard?Honest answer: the grammar is strange, the spelling is free.
- Tagalog greetingsHello, good morning, and what you say back.
- Hello in TagalogKumusta, and the formal version, with audio.
- Thank you in TagalogSalamat, salamat po, and the reply.
- Po and opoThe respect particle, and the mistake foreigners make with it.
- Tagalog and SpanishThousands of shared words, and not one shared grammar rule.
- Is Tagalog tonal?No. But stress changes meaning, which trips people the same way.
- Tagalog for travelThe jeepney word, the haggling word, and where the bathroom is.
- Learn Tagalog freeWhat is actually free, what is a trial, and where to start.
- Tagalog numbersTwo whole systems, and when each one is used.