Have you ever found yourself listening to a Chamorro conversation, song or story but it all just sounds like meaningless noise in your ears? That was me for the first 2.5 years of learning Chamorro. Listening comprehension has always been my weakest skill (in anything, to be honest) and it seemed like a mysterious process to move from understanding nothing to, at the very least, staying afloat in conversation. But I’ve learned that improving our listening skills in Chamorro is just like strengthening any other skill. It’s not magic, it just takes consistent practice and active engagement with the right materials that actually support our learning. So in this post I’m going to talk about my study practice for improving listening comprehension in Chamorro.

Contents
Learning To Listen: My Own Struggle Gather The Right Content Start With Active Listening Create Your Study Materials Review And Build To 90% Comprehension Be Consistent

Learning To Listen: My Own Struggle

I remember in my first year of learning Chamorro, I was told that if I just listened to Chamorro, I would eventually learn the language and improve. This seemed like an easy thing – listening, after all, doesn’t require too much effort.

But when I listened to the songs or other audio I found online, it all sounded like white noise. I was continually told to just keep listening, and that one day I would “get there.”

So I kept trying. I played Chamorro music when I washed the dishes or exercised. I listened to all the spoken Chamorro I found. But 90% of what I listened to remained a mass of incomprehensible sound in my ears.

I felt deeply frustrated and discouraged by this, especially since my comprehension wasn’t improving. So I started avoiding listening to the language and emphasized my reading and writing instead (note to other learners: that was a BIG mistake and I don’t recommend it). At the end of 2022, in Chamorro conversations I could only comprehend about 30% of what I heard, which I felt so embarrassed by after 2.5 years of trying to learn Chamorro.

But at the end of 2022 I finally realized what was wrong: As a someone who has to rely heavily on self-study methods, I didn’t know that I had to build up my listening skills in a different way. I also wasn’t aware of the materials that were freely available online to help me do this, even when I was an absolute beginner.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to walk you through my own process, step-by-step, of what I started doing to improve my listening comprehension when I (basically) couldn’t understand any spoken Chamorro. This is still a big part of my current learning practice, and it has helped me to move from understanding practically nothing to being more confident and comfortable in conversation with manåmko’ and other speakers. I hope it can help you too!

The steps I follow are as follows:

1. Gather the right content
2. Do active listening
3. Create your review materials
4. Review and build to 90% comprehension
5. Be consistent

Gather The Right Content

The first step is to pick audio content that is appropriate to our level. If your listening comprehension is at the beginner level, I HIGHLY recommend that you have the Chamorro transcript and English translation to go with your audio. You will improve much faster if you have these things.

Also, if you are very busy and don’t have a lot of time to study, I recommend picking one piece of Chamorro content to focus on per week. The goal is to go for a depth of comprehension, so one piece of content per week will be more than enough, trust me. But feel free to increase this if you have more time.

By level, the content I recommend is as follows:

• Beginner: Pick either 1 song or 1 piece of audio content, like a story, conversation or interview. For content that is not a song, try to pick something that is no longer than 2-3 minutes. Or if you have something longer, focus on 2 minute chunks at a time. The content you pick must include the Chamorro audio, Chamorro transcript, and an English translation. A great resource for finding songs and other audio content with the transcript is Påle’ Eric’s blog. I also have a selection of beginner songs and short stories on this blog that you can use. My friend Dabit also has a great video content on his social media account @dihan.dabit. If you find a story that doesn’t have the audio, ask a speaker or advanced learner to record the audio for you.

• Intermediate: Pick 1 song or 1 piece of audio content. For content that is not a song, try to pick something no longer than 10 minutes. I still recommend that you have the Chamorro audio, Chamorro transcript, and an English translation. But if you have people around you who can help, you may be able to get by without an English translation. Påle’ Eric’s blog is still a great resource for the intermediate level, along with the selection of Intermediate Songs and the longer stories on this blog. You can also try listening to selections of the Chamorro Bible, or Ekungok i Estoriå-ta. Again, if you find some content that doesn’t have the audio, ask a speaker or more fluent learner to record the audio for you.

• Advanced: Pick 1 song or any other piece of Chamorro audio content. You might pick longer audio selections such as interviews from the Hongga Mo’na series (you can search for this series on YouTube, as it’s scattered across multiple accounts), the CNMI Historical Archive, or the episodes from the Marianas Agupa Talkshow. At this level, it’s okay if there is no transcript or English translation, but I still recommend that you have other learners and speakers around you that you can ask for help when needed.

Start With Active Listening

After you’ve chosen your content, do a first pass to see how much of the Chamorro you understand. You’ll be engaging in active listening, which means you are setting aside time to listen to really pay attention to the audio and engage with it, taking note of anything new or the words and phrases you like. Active listening is what will help us improve the fastest.

I recommend doing the following, by learning level:

For beginners: Listen to the audio while reading the Chamorro transcript, but don’t look at the English translation yet. Mark the items you don’t know. Highlight any new words and underline unfamiliar phrases. If you recognize words or phrases but cannot remember what they mean, circle them. Notice any natural pauses or breaks in speech to get a sense for the structure of thoughts and phrasing. If it’s too fast, slow down the audio. Feel free to listen to it a few times, trying to note any new things you pick up. But don’t burn yourself out by listening to it 50 times in one sitting.

For intermediate to advanced learners: Listen to the audio first, without the Chamorro transcript. Note down any words, phrases, or grammar structures that are unfamiliar to you. Challenge yourself to write down a summary, in Chamorro, of what you just heard. You can listen to the audio multiple times, seeing how much additional information you can catch with each successive listen. Feel free to also slow down the audio when necessary. To check your comprehension, listen while reading the Chamorro transcript. This is also a good time to mark any additional new words or phrases you didn’t catch when listening.

Create Effective Study Materials

Now that we’ve done our active listening, it’s time to learn the things we didn’t know and put them into our long-term memory.

For anything you marked, verify the meanings with the English translation or ask speakers and fellow language learners for help. Once you’ve confirmed the meaning, I recommend putting the term or phrase into a digital flashcard deck so it doesn’t get lost and you can easily review it later. To make flashcards for new words or phrases, see my post on how to make effective flashcards.

If you are struggling to follow long thoughts and sentences in the content you’re listening to, try to break the transcript into phrase chunks. Put those phrase chunks into a flashcard deck for your review. Challenge yourself to not only translate the Chamorro into English, but to translate the English back into Chamorro to test your comfort with syntax and vocabulary. For more information on this, see my post on chunking.

Make sure to review your flashcard deck consistently so you can get that new information into your long-term memory.

If you don’t like flashcards, you can create another review system that works best for you. The important thing is to make sure you learn those new words and phrases.

Review And Build To 90% Comprehension

Now you will use your new study materials to fill in the gaps in your knowledge. Study your flashcard deck (or other material), then listen to the content again and notice how much of the Chamorro you can now understand.

You will find what works best for you, but try alternating between reviewing your study materials to close knowledge gaps, and then listening to the Chamorro content to re-assess your comprehension. Don’t feel silly if you end up listening to the audio a few times per day – this is good! Just don’t burn yourself out.

If you have already done this process with other songs and stories, throw that older content into your listening mix for variety. Give your brain a break by doing passive listening with songs and stories you’ve studied previously before going back to more active listening with your new content.

You can also get more out of your studying by doing the following:

For Songs: Try singing along, because that will get your mouth moving and also highlight the words or phrases you need more practice with. You can even go the next step and memorize the whole song and see if you can sing along without the lyrics in front of you. Just make sure you actually understand what you are singing and be honest with yourself when you’re just making up sounds 😉

Shadowing: For text or other spoken content, try speaking alongside the audio. You can slow the audio down at first if necessary, and then as you get used to the words, put it to normal speed. This will give you some great speaking practice, and you’ll have a speaker to shadow for pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation.

Keep trying all of these activities until you can understand at least 90% of the Chamorro while listening without reading along with the transcript.

Be Consistent

Finally, it’s also important to remember that language learning is also a numbers game – how much we learn depends (in part) on how much language exposure we get. So the more consistent we are, the more we will learn and remember for the long-term. To illustrate, let’s put some numbers to this:

If we only have 30 minutes of quality Chamorro language exposure per week, that’s a mere 26 hours of language exposure per year. Only 26 hours of Chamorro language listening per year is not going to be enough to strengthen our comprehension. And I’m talking about actually listening to Chamorro being spoken or sung, rather than being in spaces that talk about Chamorro in English. There’s a difference.

In contrast, if we listen to Chamorro audio for just 15 minutes everyday, that gives you 3.5 times the amount of exposure. Your brain will also have the repetition it needs to get used to the sounds of the language and move the information into your long-term memory. Bumping it up to 30 minutes a day gives you about 183 hours of language exposure a year, which is even better.

Just start by building a consistent listening routine. You can start with 5 minutes per day, and build up from there.

Happy listening!