I'm up to a couple of hundreds words in my vocabulary now and can put together lots of simple sentences. My problem for a while was that wherever I'd practice, I'd have Pinoys laughing at me. Which isn't the best encouragement! I thought this meant I was saying it wrong, until my girlfriend explained that people just found it funny to hear a foreigner speaking full Tagalog sentences like that. Which she seems to regard as a perfectly natural reaction as she does it too! I asked her how she'd have felt if, when she was learning English at school, the teacher started laughing at her English? She got the message but still laughs when I say stuff.
