Week 7 Memorized Second Poem!

Week 7

Word of the Week:  chixhe ‘hurry’

(It took me an unusual amount of time to memorize this word from Memrise, but now I own it and love using it.  I believe it took me much longer to learn this word because I was not familiar with the Spanish translation, apúrate.  Because my Memrise lessons are in Spanish, I had to learn this word in Spanish before I could get it right in IZ.  Frequently, I confused apúrate with aparece ‘appears’—IZ  ‘rihuinni.’)

  

Note about last week’s WOTW:  I was correct about the meaning of xquendaranaxhiee’; it does mean ‘my love.’  The reason I doubted myself was because in the English translation, ‘my love’ comes in the second line of the poem.  In the original IZ, it is in line four.  Also, love without all the affixes is spelled n-a-dx-i-i.  In xquendaranaxhiee’, the phoneme /dx/ (pronounced ‘j’ as in John) has changed to become /xh/ (pronounced ‘sh’ as in shell).  I have noticed a lot of spelling changes in this language; a challenging feature of learning IZ.

Memorized Second Poem:  I did it!!! My great accomplishment for the day is that I memorized Neegue’ ca (‘Just Yesterday’ by Víctor Terán)!  My sense of urgency had withered a little after Friday’s poetry event, but still within a week of my ambitious goal.  This means that I am three weeks early in meeting my goal to memorize a minimum of 20 lines of poetry; my two poems total 22 lines.  Of course, I am not going to stop here.  I will memorize one more poem by Week 10.  This is why I like setting realistic goals for myself.  I make it quite possible to experience the elation of success, which is very motivating for me.

Memorizing Neegue’ ca while watching a tennis match:  As I explained in my previous blog, I could not begin to memorize the poem until I learned the meaning of the words.  Next, I worked on learning the intonation and rhythm of the recited poem by listening to the Terán Podcast and transcribing.  I listened to the poem and read the poem many times to become familiar with it.  Today, I put in the concerted effort to memorize the poem orally and in writing.  This process began at the tennis courts.  I was conflicted by having to choose between my IZ study time and watching a loved one play a championship tennis match, so I compromised.  This was the perfect opportunity to try out listening to the recording of the poem that I made on my cellular phone for study outside of home.  With just a handwritten copy of the poem and my phone, I was able to work on memorizing Neegue’ ca while watching the tennis match.  I discovered that these two activities were compatible.  In fact, it was almost relaxing to watch the tennis ball fly from one side of the court to the other while reciting pieces of the poem aloud.  I was not sitting near anyone, so I was not at risk of sounding like a lunatic.  By the way, my loved one won the game!

Memorizing Neegue’ ca while eating pizza:  Returning home after the game, I continued the memorization process while eating pizza.  This time I, practiced writing the poem from memory, since speaking was not practical while eating.  I broke the fourteen lines into four sections, two four-line parts and two three-line parts.  After all the listening and reading practice, this memorization process through writing occurred rather easily.  I had already memorized the first section orally, so I practiced writing it to build speed.  The second section took a little more effort.  After writing it from memory, I combined writing the first two sections from memory for speed.  I thought it would take me much longer to memorize the last two pieces, since they contained the most new words for me; but surprisingly, it only took a few more rewrites until I got it.  I concluded this learning session by writing the entire poem three times from memory to ensure that I didn’t just get lucky.