Break Free from Overthinking: 4 Key Study Habits for Natural and Fluid Chamorro Speaking

One of the biggest challenges Chamorro language learners face is speaking naturally and fluidly. Some in our community can understand Chamorro fluently but struggle to form sentences when it’s time to speak. Others grasp the complexities of grammar but freeze up when trying to apply those rules in conversation. Some are conversational, but their Chamorro isn’t as clear or fluid as they’d like. In this post, I’ll share four key study habits that I use to help my speech output become more fluid, natural, and confident. These study habits will be from my perspective as a learner who started from level zero, so please keep that in mind as these study tips may not apply to your learning situation. Happy studying!

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Free Download: Chamorro Language Self-Study Worksheets

Recently, I’ve started creating worksheets for our practice group to help focus on specific sentence forms and word transformations in a more structured way. These worksheets are adapted from the self-study materials I designed for my own language learning, offering structure and repetition to better practice and acquire new content. In this post, you can download five of these blank self-study worksheets for free, along with one completed example to guide you on how they can be used. Happy studying!

3 Mindsets to Increase Resilience for Chamorro Language Learners

This summer Jay and I have been so lucky to meet, in-person, people from our online practice groups. We have been studying with many of these people on a weekly basis for a few years now, and I am continually impressed, humbled and inspired by everyone’s dedication. For learners like us, we know it’s not easy or fast to move toward fluency, so sticking with our learning for the long-run will make or break our ability to achieve our language goals. This means that cultivating resilience becomes a key aspect of the learning process. In this post, I will discuss why resilience is important for learning Chamorro and share 3 key mindsets, gleaned from my fellow language-learners, that can help us build our resilience.

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4 Key Learning Practices For Self-Study Chamorro Language Learners

The end of this April marks four years since I commited myself to learning the Chamorro language. I cannot believe that it has already been so long! It has certainly been a crazy journey full of ups and downs, and if I had to do it again I would still choose to learn Chamorro. To celebrate this language “milestone”, in this post I talk about the four main learning practices that are crucial to helping me learn the language, as a primarily self-study Chamorro language learner who started at level 0.

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9 Tips and Tricks to Find Chamorro Words

Do you ever come across a Chamorro word and then spend hours trying to figure out what it means because you can’t find it in the dictionary? Or do you struggle to know how to use words once you find them in the dictionary? I think every learner of Chamorro at every level encounters the frustration of struggling to find words. With our incomplete dictionaries, varying orthographies, and the small amount of Chamorro media available for supporting learners, it can make learning really difficult and time-consuming, especially if we can’t ask any speakers. In this post I’m going to share some of the tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years for finding words in Chamorro, which is geared toward people who may be unable to ask native speakers for help. I hope these tips can save you some time :)

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