i’ve been trying to learn tagalog off and on since i was first really conscious of the fact that speaking the dialect i speak at home [(fluent) bisaya] was not the same. i’m still learning though i sometimes lose interest. my advice, stay with it the best way you can and (constantly) use what works best—don’t feel that you must stand on formality. someone already mentioned it, “practice practice practice” and i quite agree. what am i currently doing to learn? watch movies. movies are storytelling so comfortable speech is there but not lazy speech. idioms are also present. they speak slow enough (most of the time) that you can catch onto the gist of whats going on AND you have the added bonus of being reinforced by actually seeing the action that people are talking about in the dialogue. i think movie-watching is quite the key to learning it in bits n’ pieces. :)