ka pai!

This week I’ve somewhat re-dedicated myself to my work in te reo Māori. When I started the week I was about halfway through 175 pages of learning activities in Kete 3. Suffice to say I was rather daunted…and not doing well at motivating myself to crack into things again. I’m reminded how reliant I’ve become on keyboarding to learn–to complete learning tasks and to integrate knowledge through note-taking, meaning making and synthesising texts. Repetition is the closest I get to rote memorisation: Duolingo works well for that as gaelige for me. Memrise somewhat works that way for me in te reo.

But the Wānanga kete are print-based and require writing and transcribing manually, which I am doing, as indicated, 99% of the time. The exceptions are all the “make some flashcards” activities, since I can’t handwrite at all. I used to be able to, somewhat, but it’s always been a struggle for me and keyboarding means my manual writing–even in block letters–is dire. And depressing. I feel stoopid when I have to hand write anything.

So I don’t. I just don’t. Unless it absolutely cannot be avoided. That means in group settings people probably assume I’m precious or snooty: I’m not. These aren’t tasks that are beneath me: they are tasks with which I am not competent. If I had an extra $10k I’d probably pay for the assessments required to document my dyspraxia/motor skills impairment. I don’t and I’ve coped for 50+ years. But it’s all…rather it all can become…really fucking hard to deal with.

Suffice to say, when I turned page 112 and discovered the last 70 pages are review or extra practice work, I nearly cried with relief. So the must-do of kete 3 is done. Next I’ll get the self-assessment book underway. After that, if I’m up to it, I’ll give these extra 70 pages a go.

Duolingo announced this week that te reo Māori is one of the two new languages for its “incubator” (Scottish Gaelic is the other). Probably will be at least a year before it’s online, but by then I’ll be feeling refreshed and ready to go. I hope.