kaosmax4u asks: Hi Lizzie ^_^, i bumped into your post about how hard it was for you to carry on a conversation with you cousin in a eng/tag mix of acros n' shorthand ... hard?, it's impossible for me as an english speaker just learning tagalog and i was wondering if you came across any good "urban" writeup of many of the tagalog shorthands ... like i don't know what 'mhie' and 'anoe dw' and many others are ... i ask while chatting but that soon zaps the deal.
tnx, Max ^_~

Tagalog slang is hard. My parents always spoke to me in Tagalog since I was really young, so I just picked it up throughout my life and then learned how to speak and write it properly through college courses. It makes sounding and figuring out the shorthand a lot easier. Not sure what ‘mhie’ is, actually, but ‘anoe dw’ would be ‘ano daw’… which is basically ‘what’.