Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay.

Filipino often puts the predicate first and the topic after it. In this sentence, tulad ng kuwento is the predicate, and ang buhay is the topic.

So the structure is:

[predicate] + [topic]

That is why Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay is natural.
You can also say Ang buhay ay tulad ng kuwento, which has the same basic meaning. The version with ay feels more textbook-like or formally arranged, while Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay can sound more literary or poetic.

Tulad ng means like, similar to, or just like.

• tulad = similar / like
• ng = a linker here that introduces what something is being compared to

So:

• tulad ng kuwento = like a story / like a tale

It is a fixed and very common comparison pattern in Filipino.

Ang is the topic marker here. It marks buhay as the thing being talked about or described.

So in:

Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay

the sentence is describing ang buhay.

A useful way to think about it is:

• ang buhay = life as the topic of the sentence
• tulad ng kuwento = what is being said about life

Ang is not exactly the same as English the, even though it can sometimes feel similar in translation.

Because Filipino can make a complete sentence without an explicit verb like English is.

English needs:

• Life is like a story

But Filipino can simply say:

• Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay

This is a normal kind of verbless sentence in Filipino, especially when one noun or phrase is being identified or described by another.

They have different jobs here.

• ang marks the topic: ang buhay
• ng is part of the comparison phrase tulad ng kuwento

So even though learners often meet ng as an object marker or possession marker, that is not its role here. In this sentence, ng is functioning as the linker after tulad.

So:

• ang buhay = the topic
• tulad ng kuwento = a comparison phrase meaning like a story

Not exactly. It is better to say that ay is not needed in this sentence structure.

Compare:

• Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay.
• Ang buhay ay tulad ng kuwento.

Both are grammatical.

The first one is a predicate-first sentence.
The second one uses ay because the topic ang buhay has been moved to the front.

So ay is not something you always have to include. It appears in one common sentence pattern, but not in all of them.

It depends on context. Filipino often does not mark articles as specifically as English does.

So kuwento can be understood as:

• a story
• the story
• story/stories in general

In this sentence, the most natural English rendering is usually a story or story in a general sense. The exact nuance comes from context, not from the noun form itself.

Yes. They are the same word.

• kuwento is a more traditional spelling
• kwento is a very common modern spelling

Both mean story or tale.
In formal learning materials, you may often see kuwento, but in everyday writing, kwento is extremely common.

Yes, you could say:

Parang kuwento ang buhay.

That sounds natural too, but the nuance is a little different.

• tulad ng = like, similar to
• parang = seems like, kind of like, as if

So parang can feel a bit more conversational or a bit less exact, while tulad ng can sound more direct or literary.

Yes, it can sound a bit poetic because of both the wording and the word order.

Two things contribute to that feeling:

1. The comparison itself: life being compared to a story
2. The predicate-first structure: Tulad ng kuwento ang buhay

That word order is perfectly grammatical, but in a sentence like this, it can feel more reflective, expressive, or literary than a plain everyday statement.