The last month has been a big one!  A lot has been going on--all of it good--but it's pulled me away from regular language study and writing in a big way.  I'm getting back on the horse now, but coming back to the projects I was working on is pretty disorienting.  Need to dig through my in-progress work, make a list of things that are close to finished so I can get get them wrapped up and posted.  I think there's a few vocabulary handouts almost ready, and one or two new essays.

For long periods of time with my language learning, I've been stuck on this hamster wheel of strategizing how to learn. I spend almost as much time planning curriculum for myself as I spend actually studying--maybe more. I make study plans and scrap them for another plan before I've even had a real chance to follow through or or find out whether the first plan would've worked or not. Part of this is just my own perfectionism/obsessive personality, part of this is my own genuine interest in Language Pedagogy as a subject to itself, and part of it is just an unavoidable consequence of self-studying a language like Cherokee. Most other learners I know seem to relate to this experience whenever I mention it.

Since my last update here, I've edited a few existing uploads: I added corrections to the "S/he's Being Mean" verb table requested by JW, and I made some edits to the Body Parts vocabulary handouts--not to correct any noted errors, but to reorganize the material.  I reworked it so Body Parts I is focused entirely on the face, Body Parts II is focused entirely on the Limbs and Torso, and Body Parts III is focused on expanding on the face, limbs, and torso. I did this because I don't want any one handout to be too crowded with information.  I'd like to keep the new vocabulary presented by each one down to an easily digestible number of new words.

I'm going to have the second Body Parts vocabulary handout done soon. Besides that, I generally need to reconnect with my Language learning projects because I've had a lot going on that's been distracting (most of it good!).  In particular I need to review the Verb Tables that I've got in progress as of right now, and get those back on track when I meet with JW later this week--in general, I just need to take stock of where I am with everything that I was working on when I got pulled away.  I'd also like to move on from the Body Parts handouts to the Clothing handouts--so I want to get Clothing I done and uploaded as soon as I can.

I basically threw my last To-Do list in the woodchipper. I've been distracted from learning over the last week because Grand Sumo started again and I've been really fixated on it--which, by the way, ganbate Aonishiki-san!

I've been using this Blog for three days now, and I'm getting a better sense of how I want to use it--I will use it as a language-learning "journal," but in the same way I use the personal pen-and-paper journal I keep in my pocket. It's not so much a "diary" for documenting days, like a journal in the traditional sense. Instead, I tend to journal in an all-purpose way--I use my journal for To-Do Lists, brainstorming, grocery lists, reminders, and so on. I use it for anything and everything--sometimes I write down little facts I learned that I want to remember, sometimes I note jokes I heard. I do try to make "daily journal entries" in the traditional sense as consistently as I can, but I don't really see it as the primary purpose of the journal.

In my last post, I mentioned working on a "Beginner Verb List" project. The goal is to focus my work on the Verb Tables by isolating a list of 150 high-use verbs that I think will be especially helpful for students to pick up early in their learning process. I've organized the words by "theme," and I plan to make and upload a list of the Stem Forms of these verbs in a Noji (Anki) friendly-format as soon as I can. The list may change as I work and/or get feedback, and as of right now the list only includes the English verbs--but here it is for now:

Since this blog is meant to document my language learning process, and since this is the first post, I'll start by quickly covering my personal history studying the language. Then I'll move to where I feel I'm currently sitting in my progress, including where I feel strong and where I feel weak, and then I'll move to what I'm working on lately.