Smart Subtitles for Tagalog

Watching a Tagalog video with Smart Subtitles on, the words worth learning first stand out. An underline shows how common each word is, and a tap tells you what it means in that exact sentence and how high it ranks among the most common words in Tagalog. Kumain, kinain and kakain all count as the same word, but pagkain (food) keeps its own place apart from kumain (eat), because you learn them as two words.

Tagalog builds many words from one root, so it would have been easy to make the list look better by lumping whole word families together. We tried several ways and chose the careful one: forms of the same verb count together, and words with a different meaning stay apart. The ranking combines film and TV subtitles with a large collection of everyday written Tagalog.