Cherokee Language Lessons

If you are interested in translating English texts into Cherokee or Cherokee texts into English, you might want to check out these files. They are called "Translation Memory" and "Glossary" files, and they are designed to work with a computer program called OmegaT. In this blog post, I will explain what these files are, how they can help you with your translations, and how you can use them with OmegaT.

A Translation Memory (TM) file is a collection of sentences or segments that have been translated before. For example, if you have a TM file for Cherokee and English, it will contain pairs of sentences in both languages that correspond to each other. A Glossary file is a list of words or terms that have a specific meaning or usage in a certain context. For example, if you have a Glossary file for Cherokee and English, it will contain pairs of words in both languages that are related to a certain topic or field.

Here I demonstrate how to take a public domain comic book, take a story from it, clean it up, and prepare it for re-lettering with Cherokee Syllabary using [GIMP] and [Inkscape].

The reason we want to do this instead of producing new content from scratch is to reduce the amount of labour from many months to only a day for the re-lettering process, once translation has been performed.

Chung-deh Tien and Joseph Erb created many fantastic fonts for typesetting Cherokee Syllabary. As these fonts are very hard to find via Google search they have been collected here together in one place for ease of access. A download link has been provided for each font followed by a picture showing the font's appearance.

Another set of fonts to consider using are the GNU FreeFonts as they properly include italic and bold forms for each of the letters in fonts more suitable for book and ebook typesetting and also general documents. Most of the educational materials I've created (not including comics) are typeset in FreeSerif.

Audio Lessons - About

These audio exercise sessions complement the book 'Cherokee Language Lessons 1', 3rd Edition, by Michael Conrad. They are also usable with the 2nd edition.

Each set of audio exercises should be completed before working through the corresponding chapters in the book. The audio will indicate when you should switch to the book exercises.

When repeating an audio exercise on the same day, you should wait about an hour between sessions.

Do not and try to cram multiple audio exercises into a single day, you will not retain the material. The ideal schedule is one exercise repeated at least twice per day. Do the session in the morning, then repeat the session in the evening. Others prefer doing them three times, morning, noon, and then evening.

By the time you complete the audio exercises, you should have little to no difficulty with reading the Cherokee in the chapter texts.

These sessions closely follow the vocabulary from the Animals app.