Breakfast @Vurma and complicated tagalog

I just came home from a nice breakfast at Vurma, delicious yoghurt with raspberries and sandwiches with cheese and avocado, yummy! And coffee of course.

I'm starting to realize that tagalog is complicated, a lot more complicated than I first thought. Yesterday I found out a quite strange thing. I'll try to explain it. It's about pronouns and adjectives. You know pronouns are words that you use instead of names, like I, he, her, their etc. and adjectives are describing words.

What's different in tagalog is that you use different pronouns depending on whether you want to express that something/someone is nice (as an example) or if you want to emphasize it more and say that something/someone is so nice or very nice. Let's look at some examples.

In English you would say:
- Sara is nice
which in tagalog is:
- Mabait si Sara
Literally translated this means:
- Nice [marker] Sara

But now, if you want to emphasize how nice I am (which you do!) you will say: 
- Sara is so nice
and in tagalog:
- Ang bait ni Sara
which literally means:
- How nice of Sara

It's definitely not the same structure as English or Swedish.. As you can see you take away ma-  from the adjective and only use the root, you also add ang in front of the root: mabait (nice) becomes ang bait (so/how nice). The marker si also changes for ni.


I think another example makes it more clear:

- He/she is thin --> Payat siya --> Thin he/she

- He/she is so thin --> Ang payat niya --> How thin of him/her

Obviously the word payat doesn't have the prefix ma- so you don't need to change that but you need to add ang. You can also see that siya (pronounced 'sha') has changed to niya. 

Another example, and now you probably get the structure: 

- Maganda ito - this is pretty
- Ang ganda nito - this is so pretty 

I realize that this was more complicated to explain than to understand, hope you got some of it at least. And hope you understand that I'm having a hard time learning tagalog :)

Enjoy your Saturday!