9/9/25 - First Draft Beginner Verb List

Here's the rationale for the different groupings I came up with:

Feelings and Conditions: These are verbs that are used to describe "states of being" that we typically describe using Adjectives in English. In every language textbook I've ever looked through, things like "being hungry," "being happy," "being sad" come close to the beginning of the book. We talk about how we're feeling a lot, so these need to be studied early.

Live, Laugh, Love:  These are "life story" verbs that I think will be helpful when students introduce themselves to new people. When you were born, where you grew up, where you live, and so on. These verbs would be helpful for "tell us about yourself" exercises in class, and would also be really useful to practice talking about past events and telling "when" things happened.

Knowledge and Thought:  These are verbs about thinking, feeling, knowing, and so on. I think that people use these kinds of verb a lot across languages, and so I feel it'll be really helpful for students to learn how to use them early and not forget them. I don't know a better way to explain it than that.

High Use:  This kind-of redundant category is where I put the verbs that I feel are the absolute most important verbs to study as early as possible--maybe these should even be the very first verbs a student learns. There's no perfect connecting thread between them all in terms of theme except that they get used all the time in Cherokee speech. Or, at least, I feel like I hear and see them a lot in Cherokee.

Senses:  I don't think this one needs a lot of explanation.

Learning and Classroom:  These are high-use verbs that are particularly relevant to the classroom environment. Some can be used for classroom exercises, others are more useful to help students talk about learning itself.

Work and Tasks:  I don't know how to perfectly describe the idea behind this category. This is mostly a collection of verbs meant to be helpful for talking about different kinds of doing, especially words that will be helpful as subordinate modifiers for other actions. 

Talking:  I think these are helpful because people tend to talk about talking a lot. Also, there are a lot of different Cherokee words for different kinds of talking, and many of them get used a lot. I remember feeling really confused about them when I first started learning--and I still feel confused about them today. So I think it's a good idea for students to start tackling them and learning to distinguish between them early in their study.

Daily:  Pretty self-explanatory--a collection of verbs for things we do every day. This is both "daily routine" stuff like going to bed and getting dressed, as well as things you probably do regularly while "out and about" during your day.

Movement, Location:  These are verbs for different kinds of body movement ("sit down," "run," etc.) as well as what I like to call "Locative" verbs--verbs that serve a role similar to Prepositional phrases in English. Locative verbs felt really unnatural to me when I first started learning--it's hard to get comfortable conveying these ideas with verbs instead of with "be + Preposition" phrases--so I think it's good to tackle them early.

First Classificatory Verbs: This category will give every Classificatory form of three Classificatory verbs that I think are ideal "starting points" for this kind of verb. Just meant to introduce students to the idea, and can be used to make classroom exercises.

Misc.:  Another self-explanatory category, I guess. These are verbs that I thought would be helpful to learn early on, but didn't fit well in any other category.

Weather, Outdoor Conditions:  Also self-explanatory. Weather is another topic that is usually introduced early in any given language textbook, usually right alongside days of the week, months of the year, and seasons. Good for classroom exercises like talking about the weather yesterday and today, the habitual weather that happens in different months or seasons or places, and so on.

If anyone has any input or suggestions, please let me know. I'll update this list with the Cherokee Index Form of each verb as soon as I can. Then I'll move on to creating a Noji (Anki) formatted list to create flash cards of each Stem form for each verb. Then, I'll use the list to help focus my work on the Verb Tables--the first big goal will be to fully Table all 150 verbs on this list before moving on to other verbs in the CED.