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; all those 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.

What is Chunking?

Phrase chunking or chunking is a method where you learn groups of words rather than individual words. The idea is that it is easier to remember many words if you can group them together and learn them as a single unit because it’s less for your brain to intake and process.

The main benefit is that you don’t need to worry about picking apart individual words, and you don’t need to understand all the grammar involved. Additionally, as you learn more phrases, you build your own repository of phrases in Chamorro that you can recognize or use. This helps you to stop translating or speaking word-by-word and gets you to process in phrases, which helps your comprehension and speech be faster and more natural.

How to Use Chunking in Learning Chamorro

I tend to use chunking to support my learning in three ways: 1) Learn phrases; 2) Learn from songs; 3) Break down long-form written Chamorro into phrases.

1. Learn Phrases

One good place to start for learning phrases is Påle’ Roman de Vera’s Chamorro-English phrasebook. Learning phrases allows us to build vocabulary in context rather than trying to memorize each word individually. We also don’t need to worry about understanding every single grammar rule before using them. Here are a few phrases, which can be applied to daily life.

Chamorro	English
Na’minagågu hao.	Get dressed. (Literally: Make yourself clothed)
Po’lo yu’ na maisa.	Leave me alone.
Na’fañocho i ga’lågu siha.	Feed the dogs. (Literally: Make the dogs eat)
Hokkok ini.	This is finished.

2. Learn from Songs

Songs are great for applying this method of learning because they are naturally broken into small phrases. Learning how to sing Chamorro songs will also get you to use and memorize phrases, and you will be surprised how often you can rely on those phrases in conversation! As an example, let’s look at some phrases from the song Guinaiya by Ti Nåpu:

Chamorro	English
Na’komprende yu’	Make me understand
Hekkua kuanto biahi	I don’t know how many times
Ti siña humita	We can’t be together
Hu li’li’e i guinaiya	I see the love
Puti i korason-hu	My heart hurts

One great resource for learning Chamorro from songs is on Påle’ Eric’s blog. He has audio, lyrics in Chamorro, and the English translations for at least 200 songs.

3. Breaking Down Written Chamorro

Another application of the chunking method is to take a piece of written Chamorro and break it into smaller chunks. Doing this over and over helps familiarize you with how Chamorro thought is structured, and it will become easier to absorb the language in phrases because you know what to look or listen for. Just make sure to only use content from native or highly fluent speakers for this exercise.

If you are more advanced in the language, try to look for phrase chunks that you recognize and split it up according to those chunks.

If you are a beginner and need extra guidance, you can look for key words and markers to get you started. To demonstrate, I’ll walk through how I would break down a sentence from Påle’ Eric’s story “Otro na Klåsen Misa Giya Humåtak”:

Ha bira i ilu-ña para u atan ya guaha dosena na taotao, pinat famalao’an, ni mandidimo gi halom guma’yu’us.

Look for Punctuation

To start out, we can look for any punctuation that indicate breaks in thought, such as commas, dashes, semi-colons, colons, etc. Let’s place slashes where these occur:

Ha bira i ilu-ña para u atan ya guaha dosena na taotao / pinat famalao’an / ni mandidimo gi halom guma’yu’us.

Look for Connector Words

Next, let’s look for some common connector words such as sa’, ni, ya, na, or lao. Let’s place slashes before these connector words in our sentence:

Ha bira i ilu-ña para u atan / ya guaha dosena na taotao / pinat famalao’an / ni mandidimo gi halom guma’yu’us.

Look for Markers on Place or Time

Next look for markers that can indicate time or place, as these are common in Chamorro. Look for markers like gi, giya, desde, asta, åntes, or despues:

Ha bira i ilu-ña para u atan / ya guaha dosena na taotao / pinat famalao’an / ni mandidimo / gi halom guma’yu’us.

Look for the Beginning of Thoughts

After that, I tend to look for words that might indicate the beginning of a sentence or thought. This could include hu-type pronouns, future markers (para, bai, u), the question marker (kao), the negative marker (ti), can or able (siña). We can also look for intransitive and irregular verbs, since those often come at the start of a thought or sentence in Chamorro:

Ha bira i ilu-ña / para u atan / ya guaha dosena na taotao / pinat famalao’an / ni mandidimo / gi halom guma’yu’us.

For me, this is enough chunking and now we can translate each phrase individually:

Chamoru	English
ha bira i ilu-ña	he turned his head
para u atan	to look
ya guaha dosena na taotao	and there were a dozen people
pinat famalao’an	mostly women
ni mandidimo	who were kneeling
gi halom guma’yu’us	inside the church

And put all the phrase chunk translations together for the final translation:

He turned his head to look and there were a dozen people, mostly women, kneeling inside the church.

This approach tends to work well for me, but it’s not necessary to do every single step if it doesn’t help you.

Written Resources to Help You

If you want to try this out with written content, I recommend that you only use writing from native or highly-fluent speakers, and ideally with the English translation. I tend to use content from the following sources because their Chamorro is generally deeper and more consistent, and they are available online:

• Stories from Påle’ Eric Forbes, which are found on his blog
• The Chamorro Bible (the 1908 version is online)
• Written content from the Catholic Church, like prayer books, songs or stories
• Transcripts from interviews with native speakers, like the Oral History Project out of the CNMI
• Any Chamorro story or book out of the KPV collection

Closing Thoughts

For me, using the chunking method has taken my ability to the next level. Every week this year I have taken at least one piece of text in Chamorro and broken it into phrase chunks, and now it is so much easier for me to understand longer thoughts. I can read faster and I can follow conversations and interviews much better than last year.

We also use this method during one of our language practice groups, and what I’ve noticed is that even beginner level students are able to successfully translate very long sentences or thoughts in Chamorro when we break it down into phrase chunks.

Hopefully this method can help you in your learning journey!