Note: For all practical purposes "Filipino", "Pilipino", and "Tagalog" refer to the same thing. Wikipedia has a page about Filipino which explains the origin of the three words.
Most people say the best dictionary available is English-Tagalog Dictionary by Father Leo James English, published in 1986. Here's a sample of two entries. I have this dictionary and it's indeed very good.
The only contender is New Vicassan's English-Pilipino dictionary by Vito C. Santos's, published in 1995. I have this too, and I think it's better than the Leo English dictionary.
As far as I know, each costs less than €15 in the Philippines. Note that these are one-way bilingual English->Tagalog dictionaries: both have seperate Tagalog->English counterparts.
Those books aren't available in western bookstores, so westerners have to mail order. A web search (E.g. "leo vicassan tagalog") will find online stores that do mail order. The prices and shipping charges vary greatly. I haven't mail ordered anything from the Philippines, and don't know of anyone that has, so I've no advice or warnings to give.
The biggest and best available in western book stores is the one by Carl Rubino, but I have it and it's not very good. The best instructional book I have is "Intermediate Tagalog" by Teresita V. Ramos. One grammar book that is ok is Basic Tagalog for Foreigners and Non-Tagalogs (Tuttle Language Library) by Paraluman S. Aspillera.
For pronunciation, the best thing is to talk with Filipinos. Most people learning Tagalog know some Filipinos. The language has very little commercial value, so learners usually have social reasons.
The second most useful thing for learning pronunciation is karaoke. Filipinos love karaoke, so a lot of Filipino stores will sell karaoke video CDs. Better yet, you could get a Magic Sing from www.enter-tech.com. That's what all the Filipinos have. If you can get someone to buy you one in the Philippines it will be a lot cheaper. That way you can see the words and hear the pronunciation. This is also useful for parties - Filipino parties often have karaoke and a foreigner singing in their language is entertaining because it's rare.
Third is to watch Filipino films. This is also good for learning Philippine culture. Watching them with Tagalog speakers helps since you can ask what certain words mean.
The Teach Yourself Tagalog box set with a book and 2 CDs is not great, and there are a few mistakes in the book, but it is the best book with CDs available in western bookshops. The only other book I've found with audio material is "Tagalog Travelpack", which comes with 1 CD.
Listening to Internet radio from the Philippines is also good - although it is usually more difficult to understand a radio conversation than to understand a film or a karaoke video.
I haven't found any useful free software for language learning yet, and I'm not sure if I'd trust a software package to get it right, but the above ways are good enough.
Some books say that Tagalog "ang" and "ng" are somewhat comparable to the English "the" and "a". This is completely wrong. Any similarities are pure coincidence. The fact is that Tagalog is very different to English and it has a feature known as "focus". For each verb, something has the focus. Some verbs are "actor focus" verbs, and whatever has the focus in a sentence which those verbs, is the actor - the person or thing that did the verb. The thing that has the focus has a marker in front of it. If the thing is a person, the marker is "si" (or "sina" for more than one person), otherwise the thing has the marker "ang". People who are not the focus have the marker "ng", "ng mga", "kay", or "kina".
mplayer -playlist
http://globe-ss.dagupan.com:8080/dzbb.asx -ao pcm:file=dzbb-radio.wav
— then use speexenc or oggence to convert
the huge WAV files into a format 20 times smallerIf you're looking for examples of formal Tagalog, then speeches by politicians are probably good examples. Gloria Macapagl-Arroyo's website has an archive of her speeches. About half of them are in Tagalog and you can usually guess which ones by looking at whether the audience was international or domestic.
The general quality of books for learning tagalog is very low. Western bookshops generally don't deal with asian publishing houses, so you'll have to find a specialty shop or mail order from a philipino company if you want non-western books.
You'll need three or more dictionaries since none are either clear or comprehensive.
Because Tagalog is not part of the Indo-European language family, its sentence structure is sometimes confusing to us English speakers. Whenever I learn something that sounds wrong but is right, I'll try to note it here.
When I was a child, I drank coffee
Noong bata pa ako umiinum ako ng kape
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