Persistent puzzles

NONE - curious what others think.

In my opinion Tagalog/Filipino grammar is very easy. IF I was forced to choose any grammatical rule , structure etc I’d choose....“Ng vs nang”since lost of native speakers have trouble with it and many learners , it is covered near the beginning of most grammar books and modules. There is also the history of the language to consider since the shortening of “nang” is actually fairly new and modern.

@AMBoy @PinoyTaj
I would think "naman" is one that takes a while and doesn't have a direct translation.
Or, how about when to use "naman" vs. "nga" when used for emphasis.
Or...how many times do you see a native speaker use the abilitive form of a verb, when you would have used non-abilitive?
There are a bunch of mini rules about ligatures that have to be pinned down that have no equivalent in English.
There are a lot times I see Filipinos using the pag+(ro)+root form, when as an English speaker I would have used a normal verb conjugation, as another one that sometimes has me puzzled. I think there are quite a few of these in Tagalog, but I admit what he's talking about is a little tough to nail down.

Disclaimer: Matt does mention in this video or “implies” that people at a high level will get most of the puzzles but he also says that they can still confuse advanced learners 😅. @jkos Hmm most of these I grasped easily, naman and nga were the hardest of the bunch you mentioned, once I gave up trying to translate everything I picked them up as well.Also we would have to define what is considered “basic grammar” and then weed out which grammatical structures are not as easy or basic as we thought they were.

@jkos Austronesian alignment as a whole still gets me. Semantic differences between ibigay and bigyan are subtle, and I'll be honest I'm usually pretty relaxed with "getting the gist" and moving on. The other thing is "ang vs ng" marking definiteness. The difference between ibigay ang kamay and ibigay ng kamay is quite big to natives but in practice, it is easy for me to gloss over in speech.