Lesson 37: Talking About Existence in Chamorro with Guaha and Tåya’

In this first lesson on existential sentences, we’re going to learn how to say whether something exists or not—basically, how to say “there is” or “there isn’t” in Chamorro. We’ll use the words guaha and tåya’ to do this. For example, you can say Guaha nengkånno’ (“There’s food”) or Tåya’ lepblo (“There are no books”). We’ll start with the basics of using these two words, then mix in a few other sentence types in the practice drills to keep things interesting and help you build variety as you learn. Happy studying!

Continue reading “Lesson 37: Talking About Existence in Chamorro with Guaha and Tåya’”

Legend: The Girl Who Slept With Her Wet Hair

Growing up, my grandmother always warned me against going to sleep with wet hair because if I did, I would wake up with crooked fingers or a crooked neck. It wasn’t until I started learning Chamorro and reading our legends in our language that I realized there is an entire legend based on this! Here is that legend, the version collected by Carmen C. Blas and narrated by Jay Che’le.

Continue reading “Legend: The Girl Who Slept With Her Wet Hair”

Lesson 13: Adding Places to Your Actions – “I drank the coffee at the restaurant.”

In this post we will learn how to add locations to our action sentences so we can say things like “I drank the coffee at the restaurant” or “I am buying the mangoes at the market.” In Chamorro, locations are marked with either gi or giya, and we will learn how to use them in this post. Once you learn how to use gi and giya, you will be able to add them to any sentence in Chamorro. Happy studying!

Continue reading “Lesson 13: Adding Places to Your Actions – “I drank the coffee at the restaurant.””