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.
This problem is especially bad for me when it comes to studying, memorizing, acquiring new vocabulary. Cherokee words are not conducive to the traditional flash-card studying method of memorizing new words--this is probably true of all Polysynthetic languages. The words change so much from one use to another--so what do you put on a flash card? I think I've figured out the best way (for me, at least)--and that's to study Roots/Stems, the foundational word parts that accomplish the translatable meaning before they are modified with Prepronomials, Pronomials, Tense Suffixes, Clitics, etc. That's the philosophy I had when I made the BVL flash cards--they're all stripped down to Stem Forms.
But the problem is that I have to follow through and actually do the rote memorization flash card study/practice, and I have to do it regularly, and I absolutely hate doing it.
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