Learning the Philippine Alphabet

I don't know about you guys but I really had a hard time learning the local alphabet.

In case I haven't told you yet, my first schooling was at an embassy school in Saudi Arabia (and yes, learning the vernacular in a foreign land isn't the most ideal setting). There, time it seems to be in a standstill. Why? Because the Filipino alphabet was still fucked up when I studied there.

In case you still don't know, the current Filipino alphabet has 28 letters. All standard english letters plus N and NG.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N Ñ NG O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

But that wasn't always the case. Our original local alphabet were just 20 letters. This set of letters, I learned from kindergarten.

A Ba Ka Da E Ga Ha I La Ma Na Nang O Pa Ra Sa Ta U Wa Ya.

It took me a while to understand why we'd have less letters than the english alphabet but eventually I got used to it. And I though it was good.

Then I hit the first grade after just one year in preschool and got another teacher and a different book. That was just fucked up. Suddenly we had 31 letters. I don't know if you also had to put up with this set of alphabet but I did. Apparently it's been in circulation since the late 30's.

A B C CH D E F G H I J K L LL M N ñ NG O P Q, R, RR, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z.

And no, I'm not shitting you younger generations. I have a book at home entitled BAGONG BALARILA I to prove it. (Balarila means Grammar) Things got so fucked up, even the teachers didn't know how to use some of the letters.

Everytime we'd be asked for an example beginning in LL we'd always say LLANA. In the book there's a picture of a lady beside the word LLANA. I think that was her name but I'm not sure. For RR we couldn't even think of anything begginning in RR so we used ... fuck .. I can't even remember what we used.

After studying there for a year or two, I went back to the Philippines and then the alphabet changed again to the 28 letters we're using now. I had to relearn shit again.

And you'd think after a couple of hundred years using the goddamn alphabet they would've agreed on something stable by now. Talk about minding P's and Q's.