Māori

  • Māori

    Kids book in te reo Māori

    It is one of the known methods of learning languages – to acquire it like a child. I think that something similar has happened with my Polish. it was not the only way of learning because I was learning grammar from the start, but it was a part of my learning – I moved to Poland, listened to the spoken language, additionally, watched movies and read children’s (I think they were more for the teenagers) books. It seems for the others that it was easy for me because Polish is similar to Ukrainian, but it does not matter that I have not made any effort. This is a topic for…

  • Māori

    Te Reo Māori – tolerant language

    My favourite language is te reo Māori. I am talking about it a lot. I also like finding things in this language that make it so unique for me. Of course, I understand that some features are typical for other Austronesian languages, but te reo is the first one that I learn, so everything is new for me. There is another thing that I really like about te reo Māori. I think that this is a very tolerant language. There is only one word for “he” and “she” – it is “ia”. I think that any gender questions just become irrelevant. Everyone is “ia”. We someone speaks English as a…

  • Interesting,  Māori

    Interesting facts about Māori grammar

    In the previous post, I have told the story of my never ending struggle to learn a Polynesian language and why after more then 2 years, I have finally made my decision and stopped on Māori. Here is something that I find captivating about it. First of all, there are only fifteen letters in the alphabet! Fifteen! Ten consonants and five vowels, which can be both long and short. Anyway, there Except singular and plural, Māori language has also a dual number, which refers to the quantity of two, as it is easy to guess. For example, if you want to greet someone, there are three ways to do it depending…

  • Māori

    Exotic Te Reo Māori

    In 2018, I started to dance hula and ori tahiti. This was the moment, when I have got a new interest in Polynesian culture. At the same moment, as a polyglot, I was thinking about learning one Polynesian language. My first choice fall on Samoan because it was the language of the first song, which I danced to. At that moment, I preferred to start any language learning with Memrise, so I find Samoan there, but besides that, I have found Tahitian, Māori, Fijian, Hawaian. It turned out that there are really similar to each other (as the languages of the same language group). This was the tough moment, I…