I am pleased to complete my first dictionary worth of sample sentences today. I am happy to continue with sentences collected from a story. Dictionary sentences are dry by virtue of being taken out of context. Story sentences are juicier because they exist within a greater overall context.
My next book is the 20th-anniversary edition of I te Tiimatanga (In the Beginning).
I learn words incrementally - that is, it takes many times before they stick. Some words, for some reason, stick better. Others not at all, so it would be a waste of time concentrating on those. A time will come when every word is 'sticky'.
At some stage in each word's journey, I will be able to recognize it on the page (as opposed to in my ear). I'll look at it, and after some seconds will recall its nearest English equivalent. From then on, my response rate decreases. It's as if my reaction time improves.
There's a bit from a recent DarkHorse podcast that I heard the other day (that I have not been able to find again) that refers to scientific activity on the fringes. Apparently, most of what goes on there turns out to be useless, but all useful innovation originates there. Or, to put it simply, there are the ideas and there's the donkeywork.
I'm an ideas man, and I accept that 99 out of 100 of them lead nowhere. Ah, but that other one!
Anyway, and on another topic, I'm going to make a point of regularly watching Waka Huia programs. Each one thus far has had an impact on me.
Today, my attention is grabbed by pronouns. In Maori there are many, for each and every combination of people: I, he/she, you, we (I and you, I and (s)he, I and you plural, you two, all of you, you and (s)he, you and they . . . Then there are the possessives.
I"m not making a point of learning them. Instead, they gradually grow more distinct, sometimes fading, but always coming back stronger. I expect that the most commonly used, and those that are more intuitive, will lodge sooner in my brain. The process is truly fascinating.
I inadvertently did some Dutch tonight, having clicked on a Youtube clip that mixed languages. Up to now, I've been doing Maori in the morning as well as Japanese in the evening. So I may as well expand my repertoire and alternate between Japanese and any of my other languages from here on out.
Nothing earth-shaking to report today. Just a slight innovation/tweak. I'm now using both sides of the page (English on the front and Maori on the back) instead of using only one side split in two down the middle. The reason is that I'm collecting longer sentences such as:
Kei te aawhina aha i taku paapaa ke te whakamaaku te maara.
(I may not need to do that as this fine spell of weather looks as if it's coming to an end.)
Using the Spotify suggestion given by Shaun Tahau a couple of days ago, I found Starting in Te Reo Maori Podcast by Grant Whitbourne. I listened to his introductory talk. He also has a series of podcasts where he reads the sample sentences from The Reed Maori Picture Dictionary (which I happened to have borrowed from the library a couple of weeks ago)
Reading Patrick McKeown's book The Oxygen Advantage yesterday, I came across something interesting. In an interview with his biographer, Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs described how the people in India seem to rely more on intuition than Westerners who favor analytical reasoning. Jobs felt that intuition is more powerful than intellectual intelligence!
I agree. It is that conviction that did not allow me to participate in the GDTE in a conventional manner. Consequently, I have withdrawn from the GDTE. However, I shall continue with my te reo Maori as a stand-alone project. To me, it is worthwhile doing. Intuition and right-brain style thinking are the huu of my waewae.
It makes sense to optimize one's learning strategies. A 10% improvement to your learning method benefits you daily by that amount. It's like interest on your savings in the bank.
Furthermore, if you can introduce additional improvements, these do not simply add up. They yield exponential improvement.
Anyway, my tweak of the day was to reverse how I enter my Goldilocks sentences. If I copy them in English then in Maori, I believe that that is better than the reverse. It stands to reason that you comprehend and retain more if you have the English meaning in mind as you copy out the Maori. (Rather than learning what the Maori sentence means after already having written it.
Posting my own 'blog' (actually a 'post') on Tuuhono this morning, I noticed one by Shaun Tahau that recommended Spotify as a source of Maori listening. Consequently, I have spend a sunny hour of lockdown day three downloading and exploring that website.
Maybe Hemi Kelly's channel: Everyday Maori is a suitable one to begin with.
Tomorrow marks the 2-month point of my learning te reo Maori. I'll write about that then. For now, though, I want to address the lethargy I've been feeling these past few days. Initially, I thought it was the return of the cold I had the previous week - and so it may have been - but I believe that I have also been suffering from caffeine deprivation.
During lockdown, you cannot go out for a coffee. Neither can one help oneself to the delicious coffee provided for staff in the staffroom. All we have at home is instant decaf. So my caffeine level is dropping . . .
The last time I went through this was over a year ago during the first lockdown. I remember that it took between 2 and 3 weeks before I detoxed completely. Will this lockdown last longer than that?
I feel that there are parallels between the historical colonialization of Maori culture and the current, largely politically driven, response to Covid 19 over these past 18 months. I'm not suggesting that they are equivalent, of course, or on the same level, but I can well imagine the effects of a lockdown mentality if it had been imposed upon a people for over a hundred years. Point of commonality:
The unexpected disruption of a lockdown meant that for the first time since I started learning te reo Maori I wasn't able to complete my day's target. Today I'll try to rectify that.
The problem as I see it is two-fold. First, during lockdowns routines get broken. You don't automatically do what you normally do; you need to remember. Second, your mental balance is affected. You are not in a relaxed state of mind that allows you to recall and retain your train of thought.
I don't think I've mentioned dictionaries during these past 7 weeks doing te reo Maori. Not until now. But at the Mosgiel library the other day, I took home two.
Te Kete Kupu (2006) looks useful. It provides example sentences for the 300 most essential Maori words. However, over 100 of those words are of three letters or less. Most of them are particle words, not base words. And these words are harder to get a grip of, especially when nothing has been translated into English.
Instead, I'll start with The Reed Maori Picture Dictionary (2001). It gives the Maori equivalent of over 1000 mostly nouns, verbs, and adjectives, together with Maori sentences that show how three hundred essential Māori words are used.
Kei te tuwhera te kūaha.
I listened to it last night. I surprised myself at knowing many of the words and phrases. I am confident that I could achieve perhaps 80% accuracy (except for the long vowels, and if I listen at 80% speed), although my understanding lags by a long way.
Not to worry. Trust the process! I shall tackle this as a running dicatiation
Kiaora tatou na whanau, o nga . . . na whanau e uto ni nei ki te kaupapa o te whanau. Me na kai te o whanau tata. Ma onga te na kea. Nga te mea ko taku whanau he whanau tata. Piri tahe matou ki a matou. Engari kai te marama
na te mea I hmahue
ki te rapamahe whare
ki te tamariki ki te katoa kainga kao whanau.
Ko nga mairano kaere piri te phoratanga te noho plangi te wakai i roto ee karakia ko te rea te reo Maori tera
ka tutu me hwaka holi te rea te reo pakeha kara haeremai tohotoho
te pakeha kuia te
aha koe koa pokake
te reo
ke kuraka
te ka tarua putiputi kia mata i a ra i a ra te whare
kia kura te korero pakeha
I am not sure if this is the best way, but at this stage, I do enjoy listening to Maori spoken by people like Chris Lowman for whom Maori is not their first language.
Their pronunciation is not perfect, no doubt. However, their pace is slower and their vocabulary is not as broad. They use simpler grammatical structures, for the main.
Another aspect is that of narrative. I find it intriguing to see how these people have come to learn te reo and embrace Maori culture.
I stumbled upon an episode of Waka Huia yesterday evening. It appeared to show a Chinese gentleman speaking in Maori (with English subtitles). I clicked further and noticed an old, school photograph that reminded me of classes I was in.
Meng Foon is indeed close to my own age. His family history is similar to mine - although my parents are Dutch, not Chinese. But I grew up in Dunedin. I never studied Maori or became the mayor of Gisborne nor the Race Relations Commissioner.
Mind you, there's still time.
I'm halfway through the above book. It helps you to gain insight into the Maori perspective on how New Zealand society has developed over the years. Growing up Maori, edited by Witi Ihimaera, contains almost 40 accounts. They describe what life was like for someone who identified as Maori.
Personally, as a first-generation New Zealander whose mother tongue wasn't English, I can relate to many aspects of those experiences.
I particularly enjoyed the account of Te Horeta te Taniwha, entitled When Goblins Came to Whitianga. I never knew that there existed a first-hand nonfiction narrative of when Captain Cook first visited this country. Absolutely fascinating.
I'd like to review a 30-minute video from 2020 featuring Stephen Krashen (who turns 80 this year) on Bilingual Education. There is a great deal about heritage languages that would seem to pertain to te reo Maori.
After a month and a half of te reo Maori, I feel comfortable and confident with my routine. So much so that I find myself champing at the bit to do more. I find it difficult to restrict myself to an hour of language play per day. However, since the point of this project is to see how far I get in six months on no more than this amount of exposure, I shall satisfy myself by spending additional time on additional languages.
The first will be Japanese. I shall spend some time in the evenings doing that. Initially, I'll view a cartoon series called Ranma 1/2. It is spoken in Japanese but with English subtitles.
I had not come across Automatic Language Growth( ALG) previously. Here's a short summary on YouTube. Below, I've copied and pasted the description of that video:
Automatic Language Growth is an effortless, comprehensible input-based approach to second language acquisition. Its goal is for adults to speak new languages as fluently and as accurately as native speakers. ALG is based in part on Krashen's Natural Approach and ideas about comprehensible input. Two main things that make ALG different from other comprehension-based methods are: 1) It has a much longer "silent period", where learners first just listen for many hours and gain understanding of the spoken language, before speaking it much or doing other things like reading, and 2) Its focus is on providing understandable experiences in the target language that create lifelong memories and are so compelling that learners forget that they are acquiring a new language, yet still learn it subconsciously. ALG was developed by the American linguist Dr. J. Marvin Brown and mainly implemented to teach Thai in the AUA Thai Program in Bangkok, Thailand from the mid-1980s until 2020.
I find that my approach has a lot in common with ALG.
Of course, that reminded me about my own walk the length of Aotearoa. I have also walked the length of the beach.
Perhaps there could be some sort of language pilgrimage where people travel in this manner, restricting themselves purely to speaking with one another in Maori. Instead of an O.E. experience, there could be Te Reo experience. I could lead a group. We could stay on nga marae.
As mentioned, I spent two years in Wairoa. I once walked the 100km from Gisborne to Wairoa in 24 hours, and I have also cycled from Wairoa to Auckland, via Rotorua. As one of the 'three musketeers', I also tramped around Lake Waikaremoana in under a day.
But my journeys happened 40 years ago. The earlier journey took place a couple of centuries in New Zealand's past.
It is possible to use any text in Maori from which to collect sentences. However, with more difficult texts, easy sentences become fewer and farther between. The collecting becomes more efficient when the texts become simpler. I have learned that both Harry Potter and the Wimpy Kid are not of that type, unfortunately.
I did not see the above number plate on my way home today. Instead, I saw an even better one: TEWAKA.
A month ago, I copied from a word frequency list. From Mary Boyce's 2006 thesis that used the MTC (Maori Texts for Children) and the MBC (Maori Broadcast Corpus) I listed both the 100 most common words and the 340 most common words in alphabetical order. At that time, I knew very few of them.
Had I went about working with those lists for a month, I would have struggled. But as it was, the work I've done collecting whole-language, authentic text sentences has enabled me to gain a fair to a great understanding of these words and many others. These words have been embedded within content-rich material. As well as gaining an understanding of the isolated words, I have also gained a sense of how these words go together i.e. grammar.
I've become more efficient with my Gold List sentence collection activity. I find that now it only takes me between 30 and 40 minutes. Since this half-year project involves seeing how far I can get doing an hour per day of right-brain play, I'll start supplementing what I do.
Imagine a wing (of a bird or a plane). When air rushes across it, that produces lift. That's my analogy for language acquisition. You expose yourself to a stream of language that you have a means of understanding, and then acquisition will automatically occur.
In that vein (vane? vain?) I spent 20 minutes this morning reading the third chapter of He Whiriwhiringa: selected readings in Maori. I could complete six pages rapidly and enjoyably. I notice that there are at least three copies of this book in the Bill Robertson Library.
