In this lesson, you’ll learn Chamorro patterns for talking about your animals and pets in Chamorro using the special classifier ga’-. By the end, you’ll be able to say phrases like “my dog,” “your cat,” and “Juan’s dog”, and be able to recognize these phrases when they are used in speech. As always, we’ve included Chamorro practice sentences, English translations, and Chamorro audio recordings by Jay Che’le to support your learning. Happy studying!
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to talk about drinks that belong to you and others by using a special pattern that’s just for beverages. By the end of the lesson, you’ll be able to say phrases like “my coffee,” “Juan’s drink,” and “Maria’s water” with confidence, and start to recognize this pattern naturally in conversation or writing. As always, this post includes explanatory notes, practice sentences, English translations, and Chamorro audio recordings by Jay Che’le. Happy studying!
In this post, we’ll start practicing with Chamorro location words—starting with guatu, which means “there, in that direction” and is useful for when we want to talk about movement or action toward a place, person, or object. In this lesson we’ll focus on 9 common ways guatu is used, starting simple and expanding out to different variations. We’ve also included 40 sentence drills to help you get comfortable with using the patterns naturally in your own speech. To get the most out of this lesson, it is helpful to have familiarity with basic action sentences.
As always, this lesson has Chamorro sentence drills, English translations and Chamorro audio voiced by Jay Che’le, so you can hear the pronunciation as you practice. Happy studying!
For this Saturday’s Praktikan Pupuengi session, our friend Danet won the vote and chose Adios Guinaiya by Rose Martinez Certeza. The music is in an upbeat, East coast swing style, which contrasts with the singer’s sad tale of being left by their significant other. The group had a great time helping each other out to get these lyrics transcribed and some words were not immediately obvious. I was supposed to be resting during the session because of my headache, but everyone was having so much fun that I couldn’t help but jump in and participate.
As always, this post includes Chamorro lyrics and an English translation for Adios Guinaiya by Rose Martinez Certeza. Happy listening!
Last weekend Jay led both the Praktikan Ogga’an and Praktikan Pupuengi groups because I was attending a Letterpress printing workshop. They finished reading Umépanglao, and I am sure everyone is very relieved. That story is one of the longest and most technically challenging we’ve read because most of us have never built those crab traps. Our friend Aric was the exception, as he was familiar with one of the methods from his crawdad hunting!
The letterpress workshop I attended finished by the afternoon, so I got to join our evening group as we continued through our list of Chamorro songs from Chamorro women. We ended up transcribing and translating the song “Uchan Uchan” from Maria Yatar, which has some lovely, soft folk vibes and beautiful imagery in the lyrics. For anyone struggling to find Chamorro music that you like, this song offers a different and refreshing listening experience. The words and pacing are also fairly accessible (with just a few challenging areas), making it a great song for beginners. This post includes Chamorro lyrics, an English translation and language notes for the song “Uchan Uchan” by Maria Yatar. Happy listening!
