Author: Schyuler Lujan

Learning to speak, read and write Chamorro while creating digital materials to support our worldwide learning community.

Lesson 34: Talking About Your Beverages in Chamorro – “My Water”

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: Beginner1 Comment

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!

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Saying “There” in Chamorro: A Guide to Using Guatu

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: IntermediateLeave a comment

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!

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Kåntan Chamoru: Adios Guinaiya

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro SongsLeave a comment

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!

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Kåntan Chamoru: Uchan Uchan

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro SongsLeave a comment

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!

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Future Tense Shortcuts in Chamorro: A Quick Guide

On By Schyuler LujanIn Chamorro Lessons: IntermediateLeave a comment

When you listen to native speakers, have you ever heard them say really small words like po or bu, but couldn’t find them in the dictionaries or grammar books? These tiny words are examples of how native speakers often shorten future markers and pronouns, blending them together to speak more quickly and naturally.

I was recently reminded of how challenging these colloquial shortcuts are for learners, when Jay and I were talking to our måli’. We can hear these shortcuts everywhere in native speech, but it’s typically only the “full” forms of future tense statements that are taught in books and classroom environments. This is why these shortcuts can be challenging for learners to recognize. In this post, we’ll unpack these common shortcuts so you can better recognize and understand them in Chamorro songs and real conversations.

If you want to skip directly to the summary table of shortcuts, click here. Otherwise, click Continue Reading to start with a brief introduction to future markers in Chamorro. Happy studying!

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