I still haven't figured out how to type on the computer with my syllabary keyboard, so I'll stick to just writing it out. . . which is actually the way that Cherokee is taught to those of us who don't have it as our first language. Sadly, that's quite a lot of us, but that is the topic for a future post.

Today, I was on Facebook for a webinar . . . I hate Facebook, but I have elderly relatives who don't understand that there are other social media platforms where we could talk, and this webinar was being hosting by someone who isn't elderly but I think hasn't quite figured out other-group-chat-webinar hosting.

Anyway, I decided to post a sign-off salutation in my own FB feed, and realized I couldn't remember the word for 'today.' I took a look in my notebooks, but I still haven't gotten them straightened out the way I want to, so I just grabbed my tiny red notebook from my purse and, since I was on the laptop instead of my phone (I have the Cherokee keyboard there), I careful looked through the few basic phrases I'd copied down, in case I came across any fellow Cherokee speakers while I was out and about . . . and wrote the following:

Dvtsilutsi, nigada. Asquali aquanigisdii. Dodadagohvi.

(Duh-jchee-loo-jchee, knee-gah-dah. Ah-s-qwah-lee ah-qwah-knee-gee-s-dee-ee. Doh-dah-dah-go-huh-ee.)

Translation: I will be back, everybody. It's time to leave. See you all next time!

Five words. It took me at least that many minutes to write on Facebook, and again now, because I had to look it up again.

Clearly, I'm not getting enough repetition in it. Why? The only thing I can think is two-fold:

(1) I grew up on my ancestral lands and I can read this stuff off like a N/native speaker because the tones and cadence are in the place names, there.

(2) I find I do better doing Norwegian in the morning, and then Cherokee in the evening, roughly around dinner time. Unfortunately for language learning, I've been super tired and falling asleep too early to get that done.

I'm not sure what the remedy is to that. As a visual learner with a weird hands-on component, when I'm grasping in my mind, for the specific pronunciation of a word, I see my hand writing the word out in my head. Writing it in a word processing program doesn't do that for me, because my eyes are focused on the screen and not my hands (I thought I wanted to be an Executive Secretary when I was in high school, so I really can't break decades of not looking at my hands for typing/keyboarding).

You really can't get a lot of repetitive writing done in half an hour or so, and I want to, also, get reading and speaking done in the same session, to link all my language processing as a human.

I'm not sure I know what the answer is, to this dilemma. I'll be posting more on the subject, though, because my reason for taking Cherokee isn't just to reclaim the language of my mother's people. I want to be able to teach it in our local tribal school. I can actually pitch that to them, once I'm well into Cherokee 3, which starts in a month.

Yikes. And Norwegian at the same time? (I'm finding the Norwegian far easier than Cherokee, frankly.) However, this is exactly why I'm here. I've set myself a goal to post at least every other day on my progress in Cherokee, and at least once a week on my progress in Norwegian, taking Robin's titling of this site to heart.

I think I'll go eat a later dinner, turn on the hockey game, and set out fresh on this all in the morning.