By Justin Neely, CPN Language Department Director
During this challenging time, it’s important to know that you have lots of opportunities to learn your language online. We have an online Moodle self-paced course with Beginner 1 with 20 chapters, Beginner 2 with 20 chapters, and an Intermediate course with seven chapters. We also have three different language courses through Memrise, and language staff have created study sets on quizlet.com.
Online self-paced courses
You will need to create a login, then allow us to confirm you, and remember to log in each time. It is designed to be used with phone or computer. The optimal browsing interface is Google Chrome. Find the courses at language.potawatomi.org.
Memrise
It is easiest to find by first going to memrise.com and enrolling in the different Potawatomi courses including, Potawatomi Language “A day in the life,” Potawatomi Phrases and Potawatomi TA verbs.
After first visiting the site from a computer, you can download an app version of these courses. Memrise is fun for many adult/teen learners as it has a leaderboard where you can compete with others for high scores for the week, month and all-time.
Quizlet
Our staff is constantly updating and upgrading various study sets. Quizlet is fun because it has different game interchanges you can play while learning the language. Learn more at quizlet.com.
We have a Facebook group called Potawatomi language at cpn.news/langfb. In this forum, we share various new tools, update current projects, host live classes and answer questions. Once the live classes complete, they are then archived in the video section of the page. We have countless videos of previous classes you can watch. We have segments for adult learners and segments my staff has been doing for younger kids.
Dictionary and other resources
Another tool available to students is our online dictionary at potawatomidictionary.com. There is also an app version of this dictionary.
The Pokagon Potawatomi have a course on mangolanguages.com, which is another tool available for learning our language. They have an app on the Google Play store called Bodwéwadmimwen for learning basic Potawatomi words/phrases in categories.
For those of you with young folks at home, we have a kids YouTube channel with 128 videos, a children’s page where kids can explore, and a page of cultural teachings with about 20 different videos.
- Children’s page: cpn.new/childlang
- Cultural teachings: cpn.new/stories
- YouTube: cpn.new/kidscourse
If you have not checked it out already, we also have Gulliver’s Travels, the hour-long cartoon version, that you can watch all in Potawatomi with subtitles on YouTube at cpn.news/gtravels.
Nasena — Be careful
Mno bmadzen! — Stay well