In my endeavours to be post-guilt, I received a box of Māori Made Easy materials in the post last week. This is designed to be a secondary strategy for learning the reo, as a supplement to my Wānanga course. There is a multimedia component available online, with a series of YouTube audio files. All thanks to Scotty Morrison.
Scotty Morrison is kind of hard to ignore. He’s a big strappin Māori man with a booming baritone voice, who reads the news in te reo on TVNZ’s Te Karere. I almost (literally) ran into the back of him when leaving Eden Park one evening. Very tall. Very broad shouldered. His journey with te reo is interesting too: he arrived for his studies at the University of the Waikato without the language. After studying it in first year he moved into shared housing with two other fellas who were native speakers. So he is an adult language learner–very cool.
The Māori Made Easy books are structured around 30 minutes a day. I’m giving them less, but mostly because the first week’s been very basic. I expect it’ll get harder.
Am also playing around with Memrise‘s free Māori quizzes online. Rudimentary, but somewhat analogous to Duolingo.
Gaelige mo scéal 