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Local teacher writes book on Chamorro language
The official languages on Guam are Chamorro and English. While the Chamorro language is unique, the language combines elements from other cultures and from ancient Chamorros from more than 5,000 years ago. One Chamorro teacher who has worked more than a decade spoke about finding structure to the Chamorro language for students or anyone of any age or background.
Jesus San Nicolas Quintanilla has been a Chamorro teacher for about fourteen years on Guam. At the onset of his teaching career, there was a slim selection of learning resources for Chamorro teachers to share with students. Quintanilla put ink to paper and began writing Chamorro resource materials after learning the structures and rules of the Chamorro language, which took him almost 10 years. Finally, his first book was published in 2002.
"It's called Learning the Chamorro Language: Understanding Rules and Structures. It covers the nine rules and ten sentence structures or patterns," he said.
Quintanilla's Chamorro resource materials include flash cards, books on legends of Guam filled with pictures and illustrations. "If I count all the books I wrote, finished and unfinished, I estimate roughly 50+ books probably more coming," he added. Quintanilla says his first book is his pride and joy because it took him about ten years to finish. And his latest book is voluminous, saying the total length of the book is around 849 pages. "It's an awesome book with 28 chapters," he rightfully boasted. "You don't even need a dictionary. It's great. If I had a choice of which book to put in my room, this would be the one. But the cost - I just don't have the means."
And what Quintanilla means is that the books are only made available at CAHA, or he sells them himself. Quintanilla had the books published in the Philippines because it was more affordable. He has approached some bookstores to help sell the learning materials, unfortunately those arrangements were never worked out. He said, "I got books and flashcards that are $5. The highest book I have is $165. It's 849 pages with 28 chapters in it."
The majority of Quintanilla's customers have been Chamorro teachers. "With the lack of resource materials, we really need a lot of Chamorro teachers we can use in the classroom or even to learn at home the language. So these books are pretty much made for that one purpose to help the person learn the language and some of them just deal with pictures transitive verbs, intransitive, adjectives - the five main common words - adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and we just put into sections and started making books in that manner," he said.
Quintanilla is currently teaching at Benavente Middle School and pursuing his master's degree at the University of Guam. KUAM News asked Quintanilla if he feels he's done enough writing Chamorro learning material. "I don't think I can stop even though I want to slow down," he explained.
In fact, Quintanilla is planning to learn other languages and author more learning resource materials for Tagalog and Japanese languages. In the meantime, Quintanilla says all his work couldn't have been done without the support of many, including Lucy Marie Siguenza. He said, "If not for her I don't think the books would have gotten this far, so her help was really needed and greatly appreciated."
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