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.
I was about a year--maybe two--out of high school when I took my first Cherokee language class. This would've been 2012, I think--I would've been eighteen or nineteen. I was going to Tulsa Community College and had to get language credits. I saw Cherokee on the course list and thought "huh, where else would I have the opportunity to study this language in a classroom setting?" I'd been interested in languages my whole life, and had studied a handful of languages before this without ever getting really serious about any of them. It struck me that studying Cherokee was a really unique opportunity, and I felt like it'd be a shame to let it pass me by. So I took the class.
The instructor was George Stopp, and I quickly became fixated on the language. After a few classes, George invited the whole class to stomp dance ceremony at Long Valley Kituwah Association. Here was another opportunity. How often, I thought, does a guy like me--a white guy with no connections to any Cherokee people or communities, no background in it at all--get an invitation to this kind of ceremony? I figured I'd have to be some kind of asshole to waste an opportunity like that.
Since then, I've learned that Kituwah stomp grounds are exceptionally open, welcoming places--it probably isn't actually all that uncommon at all for unconnected people like me to get invited to dance. But I didn't know that then, so I saw it as a rare opportunity that I shouldn't let pass. I went, and then I kept going. I went every month for a few years, missing very few opportunities to go to Long Valley. I met people who were generous, welcoming, kind, and extremely patient. My experiences at Stomp changed my life and my perspective in ways I can't fully express here--I would not be who I am today if it weren't for the folks at Long Valley Kituwah Association, and especially George.
I kept going throughout my undergraduate study--first at Tulsa Community College, then on to the University of Tulsa where I finished a degree in History. After that, a man I met at the grounds offered me a job as a ranch hand on his land in Arkansas--even though I knew nothing about any of the work he needed me to do. I like to think I became useful to him over the few years I lived there, but really I felt more like an ignorant kid getting a crash course in self-sufficiency from a generous mentor. It was a massively formative experience for me, and I came to love that man like a grandfather. Somewhere in all this, I got it in my mind to go to law school. So I came back to Tulsa and started law school in 2017.
I stopped regularly attending stomp ceremony around the time I went to Arkansas, and I didn't dance at all through law school either. Throughout all those years, I would return to Cherokee language study on and off in phases, never making any meaningful progress beyond what I originally learned in George's classes at Tulsa Community College. Then, while I was studying for the bar exam sometime in 2020, I got a call out of the blue from a woman at the grounds--they were down there for Green Corn, and she wanted to know if I would come down for the last night. I packed up and went, and that's when I got reconnected to the grounds.
Since then, I've done my best to make it to dances as regularly as I can. I met my beautiful wife in 2022 and we got married in 2023. She is a Cherokee Nation member, and our marriage flipped a switch for me to get much more committed to language learning and stomp ceremony. I got really serious about language shortly after our wedding. We got married in October, and I started intensive, regularly scheduled self-study around December 2023. Most of the progress I've made in language has been since then--everything I learned in the on/off phases before this is minor by comparison. This time, my obsession with the language isn't coming in phases. It's been pretty consistent, and I haven't lost steam yet. I credit this shift entirely to my wife, our marriage, and our renewed connection to Long Valley.
I started by working through See, Say, Write--I didn't learn any grammar, but I learned the syllabary and made sure to keep a running log of all the new vocabulary it introduced. Then I went through We Are Learning Cherokee. Then I bought Brad Montgomery-Anderson's Cherokee Reference Grammar. By the time I was about halfway through that, I got connected with a community of learners on Discord--I think that started when I found a link someone shared on Reddit. From there, my progress has been in leaps and bounds. The other learners I met online told me about JW Webster, so I signed up for his classes as soon as I could. I can't remember exactly when I started taking classes with JW--but I think it's been over a year by now. I've learned so much it's hard to summarize here--his classes have been a major, major factor in my learning since I started them.
At this point in my study, I feel like I've developed a strong Linguistic understanding many important topics in Cherokee language--but I have very little ability to produce speech, which is a gentler way to say that I still can't really speak like at all. I think I forged a little too far down the Linguistic/Academic path in my language learning, focused too much on dissecting and analyzing the machinery of the language instead of internalizing it. I think my inability to speak is mostly because I have a shallow vocabulary (i.e., I don't know enough words, especially verbs, by heart) and I don't spend enough time on speech and listening practice. So lately, I've been really anxious to figure out a better way to acquire vocabulary and find more opportunities to practice producing speech.
So I've been working mostly on curating word lists to study, focusing primarily on high-use vocabulary. Common nouns and adjectives, working hard to memorize and internalize different high-use verbs, their Stem Forms, and how to use them. I've also been trying to focus a lot of energy on studying sentence structure and word use, on understanding how words near each other in a sentence work together to change and modify the meaning of the phrase as a whole. I'm trying my best to expose myself to the language in as many ways as I can, trying to get an intuitive sense of how the language is used, how it feels to use it.
Right now, I'm working on making a list of 150 "Beginner Verbs." I don't know if there's any data out there about which verbs are actually the most high-use in the language, but that's basically my goal--to make a list of the most high-use verbs I can think of, the verbs you are most likely to find yourself reaching for in any given sentence you try to make. I'm organizing them by theme, then making a Noji (Anki) formatted list of "Beginner Verb" Stems that I'll share in the Learning Materials. Then, I'll use the Beginner Verb List to help focus the Verb Tables project. The verbs on the Beginner Verb List will be prioritized in the Verb Tables project, and I'll work on getting all the Beginner Verbs fully Tabled and uploaded first. I think that makes a lot more sense than working through the verbs in the order they appear in the CED, which is how I started.
I'm also working on making vocabulary handouts of Body Parts. Once I've finished with Body Parts, I want to move on to other important Nouns and Adjectives to make more vocabulary lists. I'll be uploading all of this stuff here once it's done and has been reviewed with JW. I'm planning on reorganizing the "Learning Materials" section in a pretty big way sometime soon--I want to separate the different kinds of Learning Material by topic and give each subsection its own separate page to make sure things don't get bloated. And there's a huge backlog of Verb Tables that I've started, but need to be filled out and finalized--I think I'm sitting on like twenty to thirty of them that need finalizing. Hopefully I can start making some real progress on that backlog soon--I'm extremely excited about the Verb Tables, and I consider them the most important thing I'm working on in terms of language overall. So I usually put them at the top of my priorities when it comes to language-related study and work.
Anyways, that's all for now.
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