How to Make Effective Flashcards for Studying Chamorro Outside of Class or Praktika

A common question that people often ask is “What can I do to study Chamorro on my own?” We know we need to “study” outside of the classes or practice groups we attend, but what does that actually look like? A common resource people may be given (especially beginners) are sentence drills – our grammar books are full of them in order to explain specific topics, and drilling them can help us learn words, conjugations and language structure. But just reading through the example sentences can get kind of boring, and translating a sentence is only part of the practice we need. So in this post, I’ll walk through how we can get more out of these sentence drills by making different types of digital flashcards that can give us effective self-study experiences.

How to Understand Longer Thoughts in Chamorro

Do you ever feel like your comprehension drops off when confronted with a long stream of Chamorro? At the end of last year, this would happen to me all the time – when a speaker would start talking to me, I felt like I could only grab the first 5-6 words of what they were saying before I’d get lost in a jumble of Chamorro that I couldn’t process. The same thing happened with reading – really long sentences felt impossible to process or took egregious amounts of time to translate, and I’d always feel discouraged. Since January I’ve been using a method called chunking, which has made it easier for me to follow and comprehend more long-form Chamorro. In this post I will talk about how I use this method to learn Chamorro.

Three Tips for Beginners

I’ve been reflecting upon my language learning journey these past couple of weeks, thinking back to when I first started learning the language. There were a lot of things I did that really helped me, but also some key areas that I would do differently . Here are my reflections, distilled as my top three tips for beginners who are getting started in learning Chamoru.

Strategies From Polyglots Applied to Chamoru

For the past month or so I’ve been watching videos from Polyglots to learn what makes them successful at learning so many languages. I’ve put together a list of strategies and videos from a few Polyglots, with my own thoughts about how to apply their strategies for learning Chamoru. These are the strategies I think will be most helpful for me, as a learner who lives in the states without regular access to native speakers.