This morning, Jay and I facilitated a language workshop for this year’s Mes CHamoru celebration with MÅGI (Marianas Alliance for Growth of Islanders) here in Oregon. It was such an honor to be part of the event and to offer this workshop to our local community. We were excited — and honestly a little nervous — since it was our first time teaching a workshop like this. But it went well, and we’re excited for more opportunities to offer language classes and workshops.

We designed this workshop as a “foundation builder” for beginners, starting with pronunciation, sounds, and word shape. From there, we jumped right into a simple fill‑in‑the‑blank introduction before moving into vocabulary and basic sentence building.

The sentence building portion centered around one core pattern: “_______ yu’.” Using that as our anchor, we slowly expanded into different thoughts by introducing new vocabulary and the small connecting words needed for everyday dialogue. Activities alternated between learning new words, language pattern exercises and applying concepts in simple dialogues. By the end, we had moved from short sentences like Maguf yu’ to fuller thoughts like Ti ñalang yu’ sa’ chumochu yu’ pån yan magof yu’. One of the participants even read and translated that final sentence — and she did wonderfully. Jay and I left the celebration with our hearts full, and we will probably write a more full reflection of the workshop in a different post.

For anyone who would like to access our presentation slides and accompanying booklet, they are linked below:

Link to Workshop Presentation: HITA i Lengguahi-ta! A Chamorro Language Workshop

Un dångkulu na si Yu’us Ma’åsi to everyone who attended our workshop – we so appreciate your time and your graciousness with us. And dångkulu na kulu to everyone at MÅGI (and particularly Bertina!) who made this celebration happen.