725

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.

724

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.

723

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. 

722

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.

721

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.

720

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! 

719

 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.

718

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.

717

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.

716

GDTE stands for the Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education. Somehow, although I am a year away from retirement, have been a teacher since 1981 and been employed at Otago Polytechnic since 1997, I've been asked to do it. 

Very well. 

I’ve done a course or two, and been credited with a few others. With this next course I’ll document it online, on this blog. I created this blog near the end of 2016. I posted daily for 700 days. And so I’ll reactivate the momentum and motivation by submitting 100 words at a time. It’s a plan, wouldn’t you say?