Home / Best apps to learn a language / Filipino
Prices and language coverage checked in October 2026.
Filipino, the national language of the Philippines under its 1987 constitution, is the standardised form of Tagalog, and for a learner the two are one language: the apps and the searches mostly say Tagalog. It has about 33 million native speakers and 87 million in all, by Ethnologue’s count as cited by Wikipedia, and 1.92 million people speak it at home in the US, the 4th language there after English, Spanish and Chinese, per the 2024 American Community Survey. What Filipino asks of an app is the verb focus system, and audio for a stress the spelling does not show.
The big apps skip Filipino. Duolingo, Babbel, Busuu, Speak and Language Transfer have no Tagalog course, Memrise has only community decks, LingQ marks Tagalog as not supported in its own language list, and Mondly, which teaches it, stopped development on 30 June 2026. What is left is Pimsleur’s 2 levels, Rosetta Stone’s 3, Mango’s 65 lessons, Ling, FilipinoPod101, the new Tahanan, the free Tagalog.com and Learning Tagalog’s grammar course. So the apps below are compared on whether they explain the focus system, where they stop, what is free on day 30 and who corrects your speech.
The US Foreign Service Institute puts Filipino in category III (of I to IV), about 1,100 class hours for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency.
The 1987 constitution makes Filipino the national language, to be “further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages”; a former chair of the national language commission calls Tagalog, Pilipino and Filipino “mutually intelligible varieties”. Pimsleur, Ling and Tahanan say Tagalog, Rosetta Stone and Mango Filipino (Tagalog), and all of them teach the same Manila-based standard. The Philippines has 120+ languages, though: Cebuano in the Visayas and Mindanao, Hiligaynon in Western Visayas, Ilocano in northern Luzon. Search under both names, and ask which language your family speaks at home.
Tagalog verbs mark aspect, not tense (completed, incomplete or contemplated), and an affix marks which noun is the topic, the one after ang: mag- or -um- when the doer is the topic, -in for the thing acted on, -an for a place and i- for a thing conveyed. Add the markers ang, ng and sa, and enclitics such as na, pa, ba and din in a fixed order. Learning Tagalog’s free pages explain it in English, Tagalog.com names the focus on every verb page, and Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone leave it to imitation. Learn every verb with its focus.
The Filipino alphabet has 28 letters, the 26 of English plus Ñ and NG, and the spelling is close to the sound, with 5 vowels. What the page hides is the stress and the final glottal stop, marked only in dictionaries and formal texts: baba is “chin”, babá “piggyback”, babà “descent” and babâ “go down”. Two common words are read against their spelling, mga as “mangá” and ng as “nang”. About 4,000 Spanish loanwords, per Wikipedia, and many English ones give you a head start. Learn every word with its audio, from Tagalog.com or Forvo.
Pimsleur stops after Level 2, at about A1 by our estimate, Mango after 1 unit of 65 lessons, and Rosetta Stone after Level 3, which it labels Advanced and we put at about A2. Ling’s labels run to Expert, with no Tagalog unit count we could confirm, and Tahanan prints no levels we could check. Learning Tagalog’s 60 lessons reach about B1 by our estimate. The courses teach unmixed Tagalog, while the TV, vlogs and Wattpad mix in English freely, as Taglish. Past A2, plan on a tutor, Tagalog.com’s reader, the news and Taglish input.
We found no standard Filipino exam for foreigners, nothing like Spain’s DELE; in the US, ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview, run by LTI, tests Tagalog. The Special Resident Retiree’s Visa (SRRV) has no language test. The naturalisation law of 1939 asks an applicant to “speak and write English or Spanish and any one of the principal Philippine languages”, and administrative naturalisation under a 2001 law to “read, write and speak Filipino or any of the dialects of the Philippines”. Prepare with a tutor who can test your spoken Filipino.
Best for speaking from lesson one
Pimsleur’s Tagalog is 2 levels of 30 audio lessons, about 32 hours in all, in “the dialect spoken in Manila, which dominates the Philippine media”, per its page: you answer out loud, and words come back at spaced intervals. It is the strongest paid start we found for Tagalog, and it publishes no CEFR level.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A trip in a month, a commute, or anyone who wants to say their first Tagalog sentences out loud before they read.
Best free dictionary and reader
A free site run by an American and Filipino couple in Texas: a dictionary with 20,000+ example sentences by native speakers and 65,000+ recordings, verb pages that name each verb’s focus and aspect, a reader for any text you bring, 241.6 hours of transcribed video and a podcast. It is not a course, so pair it with one.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Every Tagalog learner, from the first word, as the dictionary, the verb reference and the reader.
Best for the verb focus system
Fiona and Frederik De Vos’ course is 60 lessons of spoken Tagalog from daily life, with 1,298 phrases in natural and slowed-down audio, exercises with answer keys and a grammar reference. It is the one course we found that explains the focus system, the markers and the enclitics in English, and its grammar pages are free.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A1 to B1 learners who want the focus system, the markers and the enclitics explained in English.
Best live tutors
Preply books one-to-one lessons with Tagalog tutors at their own rates, and many of them teach English first, so ask for lessons kept in Tagalog. Below B1, pick a trained teacher who can explain the focus system in your language; from B1 on, a weekly lesson keeps you talking Tagalog with a person who corrects you.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Anyone from A1 who needs a person to talk Tagalog with and to explain the focus system.
Best podcast course
Innovative Language’s Filipino lessons come as audio and video in series, and its free account, kept for life, still adds new lessons every week. It is the largest Filipino lesson library we found, and it is sold hard on long plans.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Listeners who want lessons in order, by audio and video, and a free tier that lasts past the first month.
Best gamified course
Ling is the one game-style phone course for Tagalog we found still being updated, with short lessons and dialogue practice, from Beginner to Expert by its own labels with no CEFR mapping. We could not confirm how many units the Tagalog course has, so play the 2 free units before you pay for a year.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Beginners who miss Duolingo’s daily game and will pay a little for a Tagalog version of it.
Best immersion course
Rosetta Stone’s Filipino (Tagalog) runs 3 levels and 12 units, per its course contents page, taught through pictures and sound with no English explanations. It labels the levels Beginner to Advanced; we put the top at about A2. It is the longest course from a big app we found, and US$159 a year buys all 25 languages.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Visual learners who want a course in order a little longer than Pimsleur’s, and learners of several languages at once.
Best for heritage learners
Tahanan: Learn Tagalog is a 2026 app that teaches Tagalog only, in 200+ lessons with native audio, AI conversation practice and a Filipino coach who reviews your recordings. It is built for heritage learners, Filipino Americans who understand more than they speak, and it is young, iOS only as far as we found, and dearer than Pimsleur by the year.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Heritage learners who understand Tagalog at home but do not speak it, and want a person to correct them.
Best free course with a library card
Mango’s Filipino (Tagalog) is a conversation course of 65 lessons in a single unit, per its own course list, with no level stated. Many US public libraries give it free with a library card, which makes it a free first course where Duolingo has none.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Beginners with a US library card who want a guided start at no cost.
Best for reading real books
Lingo7 puts a translation in your own language under every sentence of a Filipino book (49 languages), reads it aloud and drills saved words in 12 kinds of exercise. Its 9 Filipino books are all C1 by our estimate and in old spelling: read its Stories, then your own EPUBs. It is our app, and it has no course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A2 and B1 learners reading the Stories, C1 readers who want Rizal’s novels with their own language under the text, and anyone importing Filipino EPUBs they own.
Best for video input
Filipino subtitles and a translation into your language side by side on YouTube, with a dictionary on click, free for subtitles and lookups. It works on any Filipino video with subtitles, from the news channels of ABS-CBN and GMA to the learner vloggers. The Netflix side broke in June 2026 and in September works with known bugs.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: B1 and up with a laptop, turning Filipino YouTube and the news into listening practice.
Best vocabulary trainer
Free spaced repetition with a shared deck on AnkiWeb, Filipino (Tagalog) Vocabulary Core 1k (from Ling): 1,006 notes with 1,989 audio files. It is a free way to keep the words you meet on desktop, Android and the web, and it teaches nothing on its own.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Keeping the words you met in videos, books and lessons, at any level.
Pimsleur + Tagalog.com + Learning Tagalog
Pick one course and do it every day: Pimsleur to speak first, Ling if you miss Duolingo’s game, or Mango Languages free with a US library card. Look up every word on Tagalog.com, with its audio and, for a verb, its focus, and read Learning Tagalog’s free grammar pages as the focus system comes up. FilipinoPod101’s free account adds new lessons every week.
Learning Tagalog + Preply + Anki
Keep a course going to B1: Pimsleur stops after Level 2 and Rosetta Stone after Level 3, at about A1 and A2 by our estimate, so move on to Learning Tagalog’s 60 lessons. Book a Preply tutor once a week who keeps the lesson in Tagalog, and put new words into Anki or Tagalog.com’s Decks. Start reading with Lingo7’s Stories at A2 and listening with the Comprehensible Tagalog Podcast; Lingo7’s 9 shelf books are all C1 by our estimate.
Lingo7 + Language Reactor + Preply
Courses thin out here. Read the Filipino ebooks you own in Lingo7, or Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere on its shelf, watch TV Patrol and GMA News on YouTube with Language Reactor, read Taglish romances on Wattpad, and talk about all of it with your tutor. With a naturalisation application ahead, have the tutor test your spoken Filipino.
| App | Role | Levels | Coverage for Filipino | Free | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pimsleur | Best for speaking from lesson one | A0 to A1 | Manila Tagalog; Levels 1 and 2: 60 lessons, about 32 hours; no vendor CEFR claim | 7 day trial | About US$20 a month, or US$150 a level |
| Tagalog.com | Best free dictionary and reader | A0 to C1 | 20,000+ native example sentences with stress marks, 65,000+ recordings; 241.6 hours of video with Filipino transcripts; the Comprehensible Tagalog Podcast, 350 episodes on Apple Podcasts | All of it, with a free account | Free; iOS dictionary US$2.99 |
| Learning Tagalog | Best for the verb focus system | A1 to B1 | Spoken Tagalog of daily life; 60 lessons, 1,298 phrases with natural and slow audio; a grammar reference; no CEFR label, about B1 at the end by our estimate | Lesson 1 and the grammar pages | US$99 once |
| Preply | Best live tutors | A1 to C2 | 677 Tagalog tutors; an average of US$8 an hour, US$8 from the Philippines and US$17 from the UK, per the Tagalog page | None | Average US$8 an hour, subscription only |
| FilipinoPod101 | Best podcast course | A0 to B1 | Audio and video lessons in series; 3 to 5 new lessons a week; no Filipino level labels on the pages we read | 3 to 5 new lessons a week | US$2 to 13 a month on a 24 month plan |
| Ling | Best gamified course | A0 to A2 | Tagalog; Beginner to Expert by Ling’s labels, no CEFR mapping; Tagalog unit count not confirmed | First 2 units | US$17 a month, US$8 a month yearly |
| Rosetta Stone | Best immersion course | A1 to A2 | Filipino (Tagalog); 3 levels, 12 units, per the course contents page; Beginner to Advanced by its labels, about A2 at the top by our estimate | Trial only | US$20 a month, US$13.25 a month yearly |
| Tahanan | Best for heritage learners | A0 to A2 | Tagalog only; 200+ lessons with native audio; coach feedback on recordings; no level labels confirmed | 7 day trial | US$18 to 20 a month, US$13 to 15 a month yearly |
| Mango Languages | Best free course with a library card | A0 to A1 | Filipino (Tagalog); 1 unit, 65 lessons, per Mango’s course list; no level stated, about A1 by our estimate | Free through many US libraries | Free via many libraries; US$10 a month yearly |
| Lingo7 | Best for reading real books | A2 to C1 | 9 public domain books, all C1 by our estimate, in old spelling; Stories in two versions, adapted for A1 to A2 and original for B1 to B2; your own books in 7 formats (EPUB, PDF, FB2, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, HTML); native audio in a Philippines accent, one voice; translation into 49 languages | First page of each book | US$5 a month, US$2.50 a month yearly |
| Language Reactor | Best for video input | B1 to C2 | Any Filipino YouTube video with subtitles; Netflix working with known bugs in September 2026 | Most of it | US$6 a month, US$3.33 a month yearly |
| Anki | Best vocabulary trainer | A0 to C1 | Shared deck: Filipino (Tagalog) Vocabulary Core 1k, 1,006 notes, 1,989 audio files; Tagalog.com’s Decks as a built-in alternative | All of it (iOS US$24.99) | Free; iOS US$25 once |
Prices are US store or vendor prices as of October 2026, yearly plans shown as the monthly equivalent. The same app often costs less on its own site than in the App Store, and more in Europe than in the US.
Free on this site: public domain Filipino books you can open in the app, and short Filipino texts at A1, A2 and B1 with a translation.
We have no affiliate deals with any app named here, and none of the links pay us. Prices and coverage come from the vendor’s own help or pricing pages or its US store listing, checked in October 2026, and every other figure names its source in the text; the judgement calls lean on independent reviews, and on the one star reviews for the parts a landing page never shows, like what happens on renewal. Where a vendor’s pages contradict each other, the card says so.
Refund rules, the traps to avoid and the same apps compared by level for every language are on the best apps to learn a language page.
No: Duolingo has no Tagalog course among its 313 courses, per its own course list on 5 October 2026. It runs 9 courses for Tagalog speakers instead, English among them with 998,895 learners, and we found no announcement of a Tagalog course. Babbel, Busuu, Speak and Language Transfer have none either. The free start is Tagalog.com with Learning Tagalog’s grammar pages and FilipinoPod101’s free account, with Mango free through many US libraries; for a daily game like Duolingo’s, Ling teaches Tagalog from US$89.99 a year on its site. Add a tutor once you can put a few sentences together.
Either works, because for a learner they are one language. Filipino is the national language under the 1987 constitution, the standardised form of Tagalog, and a former chair of the national language commission calls Tagalog, Pilipino and Filipino “mutually intelligible varieties”. Every app here teaches the same Manila-based standard, whether it says Tagalog (Pimsleur, Ling, Tahanan) or, like Rosetta Stone and Mango, Filipino (Tagalog). The real choice lies elsewhere: much of the Visayas and Mindanao speaks Cebuano at home, Western Visayas Hiligaynon and northern Luzon Ilocano, separate languages of the 120+ in the Philippines. Ask your family or your partner which one they speak.
We found no standard proficiency exam for foreigners, nothing like DELE for Spanish; in the US, ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview, run by LTI, tests Tagalog. The Special Resident Retiree’s Visa (SRRV) asks for no language test. The naturalisation law of 1939 (Commonwealth Act 473) asks that an applicant “be able to speak and write English or Spanish and any one of the principal Philippine languages”, and administrative naturalisation under Republic Act 9139 of 2001 asks for the ability to “read, write and speak Filipino or any of the dialects of the Philippines”. No app is an exam course: book a tutor who can test your spoken Filipino.
Filipino spelling is close to the sound, but it hides the stress and the final glottal stop, so read with audio. Lingo7, our app, puts a translation under each sentence of a Filipino book, reads it aloud in a Philippines accent and drills the words you save in 12 kinds of exercise, for US$5 a month or US$30 a year. Its Filipino shelf is 9 books, all C1 by our estimate and in old spelling (Rizal’s two novels in Tagalog translation, Tolentino’s Maring), so begin with its Stories, then import the EPUBs you own. Project Gutenberg’s 60 Tagalog ebooks are free, in the same old spelling; modern books are bought.
Tagalog.com: a dictionary with 20,000+ example sentences and 65,000+ recordings, verb pages that name the focus, a reader for any text and 241.6 hours of transcribed video, all free with an account. For grammar, Learning Tagalog’s free pages; for lessons, FilipinoPod101’s free account, with new lessons every week, and Mango with a US library card. For words, Anki’s Filipino (Tagalog) Vocabulary Core 1k deck with 1,989 audio files. For listening, the Comprehensible Tagalog Podcast, 350 episodes, and TV Patrol on YouTube with Language Reactor. For a tutor you pay: Preply, at an average of US$8 an hour, on a subscription.
Learning Tagalog does it best: its free grammar pages explain focus and aspect, the markers ang, ng and sa, the enclitics and the linkers in English, and its US$99 course teaches them in 60 lessons with exercises. Tagalog.com names the root, the focus, the aspect and the conjugation type on every verb page, so you can check any verb you meet. Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone teach it by imitation: Rosetta Stone’s Tagalog page shows the contrast of uminom and ininom, but its lessons give no English explanation. A tutor who can explain it in your language saves the most time, and Preply’s average of US$8 an hour makes that cheap.
You can travel in English: it is co-official with Filipino, and the Philippines scores 569 on EF’s 2025 English Proficiency Index, 28th in the world. Tagalog is for family, friends, TV and life outside the tourist trail, and much of it comes mixed with English as Taglish, so common that, per Wikipedia, a non-native speaker is spotted by speaking mostly Tagalog while natives switch freely. Outside Manila and southern Luzon, many people speak Cebuano, Ilocano or Hiligaynon at home. For a heritage learner who understands but does not speak, Tahanan’s coach or a Preply tutor gets you talking back.
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