Essay About Filipino

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I am an American Airman of the United States Air Force with a Filipino descent and because of that I have been speaking two different languages “English” and “Tagalog” my entire life not counting another major Filipino dialect “Visaya”. And now, I would share some of my experiences using those languages on different communities which I belong to. For example, how did I manage switching or moving between language used in my job and language used with my family? How did it affect me, how it taught me and how it molded my identity into who I am today? Currently, I belong to a couple of communities, one is the military community that speaks mandatory English at work, and the other, is the Filipino community which speaks “broken English”…show more content…
It was rough having a thick Filipino accent and limited amount of known vocabulary. As I have mentioned, sometimes my fellow Airmen could not understand some of my words because my accent was heavily thick. Oftentimes, I failed to express what I wanted to say and what I wanted to convey because my knowledge of English is limited. Meanwhile, as I learn to cope up with my language deficiency, my family and relatives in the Philippines found my accent and diction getting “Americanized”. Sometimes, I would be the end receiver of their butt jokes and they would tell me “Oh, you’ve got that American slang now”, “you speak English fluently bro”. It took me a little while before I started to fully adjust to both communities. Five years had passed and I now speak fluent English without any problems on my words and accent. A couple of months after being in the Air Force, right after basic military training, I started using only one major language. And I did a lot of practicing with my accent, sometimes exaggerating my pronunciation of some English words so people would understand me. There were times, I would read paragraphs out loud and would listen to my own words just to see if I am saying it right and if it has a perfect English sounding accent. Eventually, I got a lot better on speaking English that I have currently no issues with
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