Patience.....There are times where if you're pretty sure you've got 'the gist' of what she's saying, just roll with it. Asking her to resay every other word gets old real quick for the both of you.
A lot of areas have Speech Pathology students training for work in schools and hospitals who'll have graduate students help foreigners for free with English verbal and written expression. My wife took advantage of that.
You typically have to already be a tight couple for this, but my Filipina wife and I had--and even occasionally still do, have fun with going over words that her dialect (and there are many, many different dialects in the Philippines) make hard to pronounce.
Like 'scissors' used to be 'Caesars' and a lot more. We use common tongue twisters and make up our own. Back home, relaxing with close family, close friends in the Philippines 'dat' for 'that' generally flies, but not here.
I imagine in certain parts of the USA that are very dense in any language, the ladies/men may not feel compelled to change their English ability--they have no pressing need--even signs are in their language. I know places in the USA, where be it many of the Asian, Middle Eastern languages, or Russian or Spanish, people can go from cradle to grave in the USA w/o worrying about English.
Once you're a teenager, English is a royal pain to learn and those that do often never lose their accents.
I still occasionally still have to ask what she said, but usually it's because the TV, radio or something else makes it less than perfectly clear. Otherwise like described above I'd probably have no issue or I'd be able to read between the words--but that's increasingly rare.
Difficulty with spoken English language transfers to written English expression too and working in a professional capacity. My wife's really polished up well there. Occasionally she asks me to proof an important business letter, but then again, I ask the same of her on mine, as well on how to spell some words.
I must say I respect guys who marry women from Spanish speaking, as well as Asian and other nations. I couldn't imagine having a wife who only spoke Vietnamese or Thai--the sing song pitch drives me nuts
Culture Shock the Philippines has been around a long time --at least 1992, and I hope it's been well updated, as a lot has changed since then, provinces and cities, especially with mass media and the internet's influence. That said, with over 25 years married to two Filipinas, there are still 'cultural' things I don't know, probably never will and/or wouldn't understand anyways if they tried to explain. While sure they're are similarities across the 7000+ island archipelago, there's a lot of regional differences too. You can get old editions of that book for a few bucks.
So between places like half.com, amazon, abesbooks.com etc., hopefully there's an edition not grandly priced But it's gone from I think 244 pages in 1992 to 352+ in 2012, so maybe they found some good stuff. If you HAVE to have the 2014 edition, Amazon has it used---from:
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