I've spent one week on Maori. The experience has been a pleasant one. No pressure of any sort. No hard work has been done. Nothing has been committed to memory.
As Spock (from Star Trek) would say, it has been "fascinating". I've observed the patterns of the language from a position of total relaxation.
Already so much has started to make sense. So much has absorbed itself into my brain. Honestly, it has been so much fun that the only thing I find difficult is limiting my daily time to an hour.
Is there a secular form of te reo Maori?
I ask that because I get the impression (after having started Mihipeka: Te Karanga a Te Kuia by Mihi Edwards) that the Maori language is inextricably intertwined with culture, custom, myth, tradition, ritual, and religion.
If I were young again and had a claim to Maori heritage, I suspect that this feature of the language would have an influence over whether or not I chose to steep myself in it.
To ask the question more bluntly, can one learn a language on its own, without the baggage that accompanies it?
Mulling over the numbers from yesterday's overview . . .
Of New Zealand's total population of 5 million, about 15% identify as Maori (750,000). 20% of Maori can at least carry out a basic conversation in te reo (150,000). 3% of the population are said to know the basics (150,000). That means the percentage of non-Maori who know one of NZ's three official languages is insignificant!
I took the day's text snippets from an overview of The Maori Language from Youtube. It's always useful to get some light exposure to a language's grammar early on, and to regularly repeat that, not with the idea of having to memorize it, but just to gain a sense of what's going on.
We are like a sheet of paper waxed over unevenly and to various thicknesses. The wax is invisible, so you can't predict what you are ready to learn, and all that you can do is wash over it with paint and hope that some sticks. As the wax wears off - wax on, wax off, more and more of the surface becomes amenable to absorbing the language.
If, as Krashen asserts, one cannot help but learn a language when you have a means of understanding it as you are exposed to it, then it would be redundant to carrying out formative assessment. One would automatically improve.
Therefore, an alternative assessment would consist of checking the following:
Regarding assessment (my current GDTE course), what or who is the assessment about?
Are there two types of assessment that I need to consider?
As it happens, and by coincidence, my wife, Mami, will also focus on te reo this coming semester as part of her clinical psychology training. It'll be interesting to see how she manages, and which method her department promotes.
Among her notes, I discovered a glossary of useful maori words and expressions that a doctor might need. I've extracted some for myself, as you never know when you might need to refer to blood pressure and breathing in real life!
A couple of days ago, I was searching for Maori content online. I was after a list of books translated into te reo. What I found was an initiative instead.
An article from 2017 said that 100 books were going to be translated into Maori. Fantastic!
Yesterday, at the Mosgiel Public Library, I found the first of those 100 books on the shelf. It is the first in the Harry Potter series, published in 2020 just last year.
I have browsed that book in 20 languages. For most of them, I can recognize the story elements. The te reo version looks about as recognizable for me as Finnish.
Easier than Arabic and Chinese. More difficult than Polish or Swedish.
I plan to wait a month before starting on the next GDTE course. That's because I want to cement the habit of language learning in place first. I've almost completed my first week, but I understand that habits may take a month to become established.
But the above thought started me thinking that for language learners starting out, we shouldn't be testing their output. Output comes last, as a natural result of absorbing a ton of input (listening and reading).
That has implications for assessment, especially at the early stages. This is an idea that I ought to develop.
I’ve created a playlist on YouTube. I’m collecting interesting-looking videos with Maori content. And although I cannot read or listen to them in full, I can play a game of extracting useful snippets.
I copy out and collect not just single words. Instead, I aim for couplets, phrases, and occasionally a complete sentence. (I need a bit of glue between words, or a bit of a pattern.)
My initial project is the children’s book about the seven stars. Luckily, I was able to save it to the list. For some reason, videos with content for children may not be saved.
I’m putting the proof into the pudding, as it were. By that, I mean that I’m working to develop, as well as trial, techniques that are right-brain and effective. Regarding that, I’ll coin a new word . . .
I believe that to engage the right brain, we need to ‘nerdify’ the subject. Instead of studying a language, it would be better, I’m certain, to think of the exercise as a sport, hobby, interest, pastime, or, in my case at least, something that I can intellectually fool around with.
Tomorrow, I’ll describe how I’m starting to use YouTube for that.
I have nothing against grammar. I'm just not prepared to apply myself to it, at least not in the manner people usually do.
I have a couple of books heavy on grammar that I mean to browse lightly. One is Lyndsay Head's Making Maori Sentences (1989). The other is book 1 of Te Ranatahi by Hoani Waititi, first put out in 1962. (Almost as old as I am!)
I’ve started to quickly skim through them, copying out only a sentence per page. I select those from which I know a word or two—or expect to in the near future.
I like to capture what I come across, so here’s a short snippet from a YouTube video that features Stephen Krashen. In it, he condenses his message into less than 100 words. (I have slightly edited the segment.)
To summarize the last 50 years of research. We don’t acquire language by study, by hard work, by learning grammar rules, by having errors corrected, by memorizing vocabulary lists, by trying to speak all the time, and by writing. There’s only one way: understanding. If someone speaks to you in another language, and you understand what they’re saying, you acquire the language.
Mihi Edwards wrote a trilogy. I own the first two books, and Dunedin Library has the third. I read the first book a few years ago, but I haven’t the other two.
Mihi sprinkles Maori words and phrases throughout her work. It is an autobiography. She was born in 1918, and three weeks later her mother died of the flu during the epidemic at that time.
An activity I plan to do is make a count of all the Maori used in at least the first book: Mihipeka—Early Years. I’ll use Excel for that. I made a start yesterday.
Google Translate works for Maori. That could certainly be useful. And so, the other day I experimented by typing in some English sentences. I figure that simple sentences ought to translate well if I stick to simple grammar and avoid any idiom.
So that the sentences weren’t random, I obtained or adapted them from a book. I used Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson.
I will copy them out according to my version of David James’s Gold List Method. I will start my daily session in that manner. I feel motivated to do so, and that must be a good thing!
The GSTE course I’ll do this semester is an elective: Work-based learning project (advanced assessment). Quite a mouthful but not, hopefully, a bite too big to chew.
I’ll learn a language for 6 months, using right-brain techniques. I want to see how far I get. To assess my improvement in Maori, I’ll need to develop a new tool. That’s because I will advance across a broad front; I won’t become an expert in one or more areas. Also, because I’ll focus on input rather than output, I'll need to measure how much I recognize language features instead of reproducing them.
I have just reviewed the 35+ 100-word posts of this blog that include the word ‘Maori’. They reach back to November 2016 and pause midway through 2018. They were interrupted then due to my being obliged to enroll in NCAL (National Certificate in Adult Literacy and Numeracy). Now I plan to resume my language activities, using the GDTE as an opportunity.
I shall prepare a fuller post that summarizes what I’ve done. Here, I’ll share the fact that I’ve accumulated 300-odd lines of text accumulated from an old newspaper, several children’s books, a couple of textbooks, and online, from YouTube.
As part of my GDTE, I plan to learn Te Reo. I also want to document the journey of that, and I’ll do so on this blog. To make posts easier to find, I’ll label them ‘Maori’ and ‘GDTE’ as appropriate.
Of the 700+ posts here, I’ve already mentioned Maori in 37 of them, so I’m not starting off totally from scratch.
I shall also continue my other languages. If I do two sessions of language learning per day, the first will always be Maori. The second will alternate between Japanese and any of the other 28 I’ve looked at.
