Tēnā koutou!

I have finally started studying Māori, and I am so excited! The title of this post is how you say hello to three or more people, and I am quite proud that I know that. :)

I found a program online called Tōku Reo, which means "My Language." It includes videos that teach you vocab, grammar, and culture, as well as online activities and tests. I am also using a book called Teach Yourself Māori that my friend Richard Harris gave me before I left. (Thanks!!) It works really well to be able to hear it and get pronunciation online, but then to have the book to look up things that I'm confused about.

I think that Māori will be challenging to learn, for a variety of reasons. Here are the main three so far.

1) The sentence formation is very different than English and French. Both of those languages have a subject, verb, object order. But Māori has a verb, subject, object order, which is very different. In addition, verbs are not conjugated in Māori the way they are in English and French. There are words that show tenses, but the verb stays the time regardless of the subject or tense. All of these things are learnable, but for the moment, it makes me feel like I'm just stringing related words together, rather than putting them together into a meaningful sentence. I'll just have to learn a new way to understand sentences.

2) Unlike French or English, Māori pronunciation includes long vowels and short vowels, with the sound being exactly the same, and only the duration differing. I didn't think that this was a big deal when I first read it, but now it seems quite hard. Because I have never had to pay attention to sound lengths in language, I barely hear the difference between long and short vowels in Māori, and that is a problem in meanings of words. For example, 'keke' (two short 'e's) means 'cake,' but 'kēkē' (two long 'e's) means 'armpit.' I would like to have a healthy differentiation between these words, but when they say them both on TV, they sound the same to me. I will just have to practice, I guess.

3) There are lots of vowels in Māori words, and I sometimes find it hard to hear or pronounce them all. In fact, there are no consonant combinations in at all - each consonant is followed by one or more vowels, and all words end in a vowel. It makes the language very beautiful, in my opinion, but it also makes it hard to figure out where all those vowels go.

I am off to meet Kirsten for tea, but when I get back, I am going to tackle the next video and see what I can learn. :)