I GREW up in Manila — a Tagalog-speaking area, needless to say. In a middle-class neighborhood, everyone spoke Tagalog. English was not a totally unfamiliar language, but nobody used it in everyday conversations in the community. My father was one of the better speakers of the language in the neighborhood, but we did not usually use it for everyday communication at home. Not rarely, but not frequently.
I could not remember exactly when my love for English began. I remember how I struggled sometimes in my English language classes, but as I grew older and progressed through elementary, I became better at it. In high school, I decided to major in English for university. Since then, English has become a very important, if not the dominant, language of my life. As a university professor in Tokyo, I have more interactions in English than in Tagalog or even Japanese, for that matter.
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