When We Were Young

Medrano, PuraProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

2.5

Word count: 49K words
Chapters: 5

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Nang Bata Pa Kami by Pura MedranoAuthor: Medrano, Pura,Language: Tagalog, Class: PL: Language and Literatures: Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania, Release Date: Oct 10, 2004

Editor's review

This is a short electronic text in Tagalog, made publicly available through Project Gutenberg and a suitable entry point into Philippine literary language and narrative traditions. The title, Nang Bata Pa Kami, means roughly “When We Were Young,” suggesting childhood memories, family life, and provincial experience. Readers can sense the natural rhythm of Tagalog literary narration and the texture of everyday life in twentieth-century Philippine society. For those learning Tagalog or studying Southeast Asian literature, it is more a primary text to read closely than a tightly plotted long work. It is best read alongside a dictionary and background notes, as a language sample and a piece of literary-historical material rather than something to rush through.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers learning Tagalog who want to encounter short original texts
Literature enthusiasts interested in Philippine literature and Southeast Asian provincial narratives
Teachers who need public-domain texts for language teaching or cultural research
Readers who enjoy short memoir-like prose and are comfortable with non-Chinese source texts

Not a good fit for

General readers with no Tagalog and no access to a translation
Readers expecting a full-length plot or strong dramatic conflict
Those who need a modern typeset, heavily annotated edition, or a collectible paper book

Reading tips

Read through once for the feel of the language, then look up words paragraph by paragraph and note high-frequency Tagalog expressions.
Read alongside background material on Philippine history and provincial life rather than treating it only as a language exercise.
Read one short section at a time and retell it in your own words afterward, testing comprehension rather than speed.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Can I read this book without knowing Tagalog?

You can work through it sentence by sentence with a dictionary or translation tool, but direct comprehension will be difficult. It is better suited as language-learning material or a research text than as zero-background leisure reading.

Is this book suitable as classroom reading?

It can serve as supplementary material for short Tagalog reading or Southeast Asian literature selections. Teachers can excerpt passages and pair them with vocabulary lists and background introductions to help students understand both the language and its everyday context.

What kind of content is it?

Judging from the title and language, it is a short memoir-like text written in Tagalog and limited in length. It does not rely on complex plotting and is better suited to close reading of language and everyday experience.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Medrano, Pura Author

Pura Medrano is an author about whom very little public information is available. To date, only one work is known under her name, Nang Bata Pa Kami. Because early bibliographic records are brief, her nationality, dates of birth and death, and personal history all remain to be verified, and the existing material is not enough to sketch a complete biography. On the basis of what is known, this work is the main entry point for understanding her. Its title shows features of Tagalog, suggesting a connection to Philippine language and culture and a subject possibly related to childhood memories and experiences of growing up. The work appears only in early bibliographic records, which indicates a limited circulation, yet it has left a trace within a particular bibliographic tradition. For researchers, Medrano is a name still to be explained: the work survives, while her life awaits further study. In the absence of more historical sources, she can only be introduced cautiously on the basis of existing bibliographic information, without overreaching inference, with attention focused on the work itself and the linguistic and cultural context in which it is situated.