Year: 2023

Lesson 18: Talking About Actions Without Objects – Introduction to Intransitive Verbs and Affixes in Chamorro

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: Beginner4 Comments

Up until now, my notes about action sentences in Chamorro have focused on the use of transitive verbs, which are verbs that require their action to be transferred to an object. In this next series of posts on basic action sentences, we will learn how to start using intransitive verbs to make sentences like “I am jumping” or “We sat down.” This first post will be an introduction to the concept of affixes and intransitive verbs in Chamorro, including a beginner-level review of the different categories of intransitive verbs and the affixes they take. Happy studying!

taitai mås

How to Understand Longer Thoughts in Chamorro

On By Schyuler LujanIn Study Tips1 Comment

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.

taitai mås

Lesson 17: Talking About What We Can and Can’t Do in Chamorro – “I can drink the coffee”

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: Beginner2 Comments

In this post we’ll learn how to talk about what we can and cannot do, such as “I can drink the coffee” or “I cannot drink the milk.” To talk about what we can or cannot do in Chamorro, we must use the word siña in our sentences. We’ll learn about the word siña and some of the most basic statements we can make, then we will go through some practice sentences to talk about what we can do, cannot do, and to ask questions. Happy studying!

Continue reading “Lesson 17: Talking About What We Can and Can’t Do in Chamorro – “I can drink the coffee”” →

Kåntan Chamoru: I Yori

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro SongsLeave a comment

On Saturday evenings our practice group has been doing something new. We pick a Chamorro song, listen to it, write down all the lyrics in Chamorro and then translate the song into English. At the end, we all mute ourselves and sing along. This is actually one of the primary methods that my boyfriend used to learn Chamorro when he was in high school – he listened to Chamorro songs over and over, wrote down the lyrics, and then translated them. When he proposed this activity for our evening practice group I was less than thrilled because I prefer stories to music, and listening comprehension is my weakest skill. But damn, this exercise really helps! We’ve been doing this for almost 3 months now, and I can really see an improvement in my listening comprehension. Here are the lyrics and translation we did for “I Yori” by Mike Duenas, which is now one of my favorite Chamorro songs.

taitai mås

Lesson 16: How to Say “Must” and “Should” in Chamorro – “I must drink the coffee”

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: Beginner3 Comments

In this post, we’ll learn how to talk about when we must or shoud do something, such as in sentences like “I must drink the coffee” or “I should buy the coffee.” In Chamorro, we do this by using the word debidi with our future tense statements. We’ll review how to use debidi and do some sentence drills for practice. Happy studying!

taitai mås