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.

It’s About Personal Effort

Across all the different polyglots and their strategies, the one thing they shared in common is the consistent, personal effort they put into language study. Although they use different resources and strategies, they cannot become fluent in their target language without daily commitment and personal study. This is true for anything we want to learn, not just languages.

As learners, we need to ask ourselves what our daily commitment looks like. Is it writing a journal entry in Chamoru, sitting down with our copy of Spoken Chamorro to learn new grammar, or drilling our flashcard sets? Whatever it is, we need to find what is most effective in our own learning and commit to that on a consistent basis.

Use Drills to Prevent Over-Thinking

In the video How to Learn Grammar: The Only Method You’ll Ever Need from Polyglot Luca Lampariello, he talks about how 80% of our learning should be implicit while 20% should be explicit. What exactly does this mean?

He’s referring to a challenge specific to adult language learners. In a recent study done by MIT, they found that adults often fail at learning additional languages because we over-think. We’ll often get tangled up in thinking about the technicalities of grammar rules rather than actually using the language. To avoid the pitfall of over-thinking, we can use drills for absorbing language patterns.

Drills are incredibly helpful for my learning, especially with a language like Chamoru. Sentence structures are often completely different, and Chamoru does things that don’t happen in English (reduplication, anyone?). Drills turn my brain off, and the repetition helps me to learn new grammar without overthinking. Drills also make it easier to learn new vocabulary because they create images in my mind that I can associate with the new words.

For Chamoru, I really like the drills from Dr. Bevacqua’s class handouts and the drills from the Spoken Chamorro book. But the MOST helpful strategy is making my own sentence drills and using them in everyday life. Once we learn a basic grammar pattern, we can take a little extra time to create our own drills that we are likely to use in our daily lives.

Keep it Simple at the Beginning

Polyglot Lýdia Machová has this fantastic presentation called Ten Things Polyglots Do Differently where she discusses the strategies that make different Polyglots successful. One of her own strategies that resonated with me was her strategy to keep it simple at the beginning.

She gives a fantastic example from when she was first learning Spanish. She went out with a group of friends who were fluent in Spanish and they asked her where they could find some food. Since she was a beginner, she replied with, “There’s some food in that house over there.” It prompted a lot of laughs from herself and her friend group because her sentence was a bit clunky. Despite this, she communicated effectively even with simple words and grammar. As second language learners, we need to accept that our sentences will be a bit weird and clunky at the beginning.

So let’s let go of feeling so mamåhlao and use the Chamoru we have, trusting that the more we use the language, the more we will grow in the language.

Speak To Yourself Everyday in Chamoru

Polyglot Robin MacPherson has an interesting and unique strategy for developing his speaking skills that is perfect for a Chamoru language learner in my situation. He does not converse with native speakers until much later in his learning process. Instead, he levels up his speaking skill by himself by talking to himself in the target language. This puts him at a more fluid conversational level before he converses with any native speakers.

For someone like me who can’t access native or fluent speakers on a regular basis to converse with, his approach is invaluable for my learning situation. I can still learn how to speak in the language, even if I’m just speaking by myself at first.

But this strategy also makes a lot of sense for Chamoru specifically, especially given the shame that a lot of us second language learners struggle with. In our learning community, learners are at various levels with the language. There are learners who can generally understand Chamoru when it’s spoken to them, but struggle to form sentences in conversation with manåmko’. Maybe Chamoru is only understood in specific contexts, with specific topics. Or there are learners like me who started at level 0 with everything. This can prompt a lot of shame when we try to speak to relatives who are native speakers, especially if our chances to speak with them are limited.

So his strategy can actually help with this. We can’t get around the fact that we will make mistakes, but it’s possible to get up to a certain level of speaking and understanding without being in situations that are so stressful that we can’t actually learn.

Create Your Own Comprehensible Input

A lot of Polyglots talk about the term comprehensible input, which refers to materials that contain content you can almost entirely understand. From what I could gather, comprehensible input seems to be the holy grail resource for language learning. But what if your target language doesn’t have these materials?

In his video about How to Make Input More Comprehensible, Robin Macpherson addresses this issue of resource scarcity. If we don’t have comprehensible input in Chamoru, we can still make our existing content more comprehensible to us.

So how can we do this? We can transcribe any audio materials that we encounter, such as songs or dialogue. Although this is more work than having the materials made for us, our interaction with the material will take us a long way in our learning. As a beginner, I find it easiest to start out with Chamoru songs. The lines are short and many of songs use the same or similar words and phrases. The grammar may not be perfect, but at the beginner stage when a full dialogue might be too overwhelming to transcribe, songs are a great start.

We can also listen to or read material over and over. With each repetition, we will pick up something new and our comprehension will improve. For myself, if I don’t know a word, I will write it down and look it up later. When I listen to the audio again or read the text again, it reinforces my learning for that word. This makes it easier to hear or focus on other words that I didn’t notice the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time. There’s so much power in repetition.

Robin’s strategy is important for learning Chamoru because our resources (especially if we’re in the states) are more scarce. Yes, it would be great if we had Google Translate or Rosetta Stone. But our current learning reality is that we must learn without these platforms. We need to leverage what we have rather than waiting for someone to create a Pimsleur course. If we wait for a Pimsleur course, we might never learn.