#māori language

[quinthetoucan]

y'all please check out my friend alex's book!! its a free online resource for learning māori, the endangered indigenous language of new zealand, and we hope that it can help spread this beautiful language to even more people!

(plus this book is a blast hehe)

[haveyouheardthisphrase]

Originally a greeting from the Māori language, it has entered common English in Aotearoa.

[multimediacreative]

I am Hana project

We are excited to be sharing the media release for the I am Hana project. The I am Hana project is an important event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the presentation of the Māori language petition to parliament, and will be held from 30 August to 15 September in New Plymouth. Te reo and te ao Māori have been one of the reasons that initiated the creation of BiograView when discovering…

[ayin-me-yesh]

In light of Duolingo laying off its translators, here are my favourite language apps (primarily for Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and te reo Māori).

Multiple Languages

Anki is a flashcard programme and app that's not exclusively for languages. While making your own decks is ideal, you can also download shared decks for most languages.

If you're learning Japanese, specifically, Seth Clydesdale has websites for practicing alongside Genki's 2nd or 3rd editions, and he also provides his own shared Anki decks for Genki.

And if you're learning te reo Māori, specifically, here's a guide on how to make your own deck.

TOFU Learn is an app for learning vocabulary that's very similar to Anki. However, it has particularly excellent shared decks for East Asian languages. I've used it extensively for practicing 汉字. Additionally, if you're learning te reo Māori, there's a shared deck of vocabulary from Māori Made Easy!

Mandarin Chinese

Hello Chinese is a fantastic app for people at the HSK 1-4 levels. While there's a paid version, the only thing paying unlocks is access to podcast lessons, which imo are not really necessary. Without paying you still have access to all the gamified lessons which are laid out much like Duolingo's lessons. However, unlike Duolingo, Hello Chinese actually teaches grammar directly, properly teaches 汉字, and includes native audio practice.

Japanese

Renshuu is a website and app for learning and practicing Japanese. The vast majority of its content is available for free. There's also a Discord community where you can practice alongside others.

Kanji Dojo is a free and open source app for learning and practicing the stroke order of kanji. You can learn progressively by JLPT level or by Japanese grades. There's also the option to learn and practice kana stroke order as well.

[mwagneto]

genuinely about to cry at the word for france in te reo māori. so like. almost every country name is just the english name but altered to only have letters that exist in te reo (so like canada = kānata, norway = nōwei etc) except france that is literally just fucking. wīwī. as in ouioui. imgoing to fucking die

[ofmdtereomaori]

I'm begging you, please stop italicising te reo Māori words in your fics.

There's a really excellent article by Khairani Barokka on why italicising non-English words in general is not a great idea. (tl;dr: it's very othering)

For te reo there's an additional reason, which is that most of us in Aotearoa stopped italicising te reo decades ago and now when we see it it looks fucking weird. It feels like you're holding the word with tongs; like you're saying "hey I found this weird foreign word and I don't really know what to do with it!"

Which is a pity, because there's some really good fics out there exploring Ed's Māori identity, and the italicising makes them look less good than they are. (I'm planning a specific recs post, but want it to be 100% positive, also there's stuff I haven't read yet.)

I don't want this to be a call out post, because I hate that shit, and I know that everyone's coming from a good place. If you've been italicising te reo words, you're probably doing what you were taught was the right thing, and I genuinely don't want you to feel bad about it. This is just a learning experience; go forth and use italics as they should be used in fan fiction:

"Oh. Oh."

PS I can't write about italicisation and te reo without mentioning the brilliant Alice Te Punga Somerville and the especially her poem Kupu rere kē.

[in-sufficientdata]

A bilingual book about the Māori creation story has won the highest accolade in children's literature.

Te Wehenga: The Separation of Ranginui and Papatūānuku by Motueka writer Mat Tait (Ngāti Apa ki te rātō) won the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award at New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults held at Wellington's Pipitea Marae.

Te Wehenga simultaneously tells the Māori creation pūrākau, which explains the beginning of the world, in te reo Māori and English.

[blackberryjambaby]

some māori words to describe your māmae

(māmae is pain, hurt or injury, wairua is spirit, papatūānuku is the mother earth)

pōuri: grief, sadness.

ngākau pōuri: literally 'sad heart'. a heart-wrenching sadness, when your wairua is in great distress.

ngākau rua: literally 'two hearted'. when our wairua feels both negative & positive emotions simultaneously, as if we have two hearts.

pūtakotako: to be overcome with deep grief, when your wairua is deeply distressed.

ngaukino: a long-lasting emotional reaction that happens as a result of witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event.

whakaaroha: to be heart-wrenching, pitiful or poignant.

nekeneke: when our minds jump from one thing to another, an inability to concentrate or focus for extended periods of time.

hūkokikoki: to be emotionally unstable or erratic, jumping between emotions quickly. if someone's having a bit of a wobble, they're hūkokikoki.

wainuku: bad mood or feeling low. originally comes from the sensation that our bodies & waters are dragging us towards papatūānuku

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

in te reo Māori we have the word 'manu' which primarily refers to birds but can also mean any other sort of flying creature like moths, flies and bats

:O thank you for sharing, I love that. In fact, bird used to refer to bats, too! And lots of other things. Before it was coopted to be a classification term.

[ladyimaginarium]

from mikjikj-mnikuk/turtle island to inuit nunangat to kanata to kalaallit nunaat to anahuac to abya yala to alkebulan to the levant to moananuiākea to sápmi to éire to bhārata to zhōngguó to nihon to aynu mosir to siberia to niugini to nusantara to bandaiyan to aotearoa, from coast to coast to coast to coast, from sea to sea to sea to sea, none of us are free until all of us — men, women, enben, children, queer people, disabled & neurodivergent people, elders, animals and the land and the sea and the sky — are free!!!!

[bundleoflanguages]

Any Langblrs still here?

I’ve come back to Tumblr after 2 years and it seems like most of the langblrs I knew decided to leave so if you’re a langblr out there and are at least one of the following, please like or reblog so I can follow:

- Studying German

- Studying French

- Studying Korean

- Studying Maori

- Studying Suomi

- Studying Mandarin

- 25+ y/o langblr of any language

[salvadorbonaparte]

Te Reo Māori Resources

Books 

MEGA folder

Huia Publisher

Websites

Omniglot

Commonly Used Words

Māori Language Net

Newspapers

Swadesh List

Toku Reo

Toro Mai

Dictionaries

Victoria University

Te Aka

Ngata

Apps 

Drops

Memrise

Te Aka

Tipu Te Reo Māori

Kōrerorero

Youtube 

Ako Māori

Reo  Māori

Bonus

Poi E -  Pātea Māori Club

[multimediacreative]

Te wiki o te reo Māori

[ayin-me-yesh]

If you're just starting with Te reo Māori, this YouTube playlist is great for covering pronunciation in depth.

Another option is this Te Reo Māori Pronunciation Training course which is free and online.

And the same website also offers a free course on grammar basics, also online.

[balthazarslostlibrary]

Please spell people's names correctly

One of my biggest frustrations as a teacher is when people don't bother to put diacritics on peoples' names when they need them. I don't give a shit if you 'don't know how to do it on your keyboard', learn how to do it, that's someone's fucking name.

In my experience, it happens most with Pasifika and Māori names because the (usually white) teacher or school administrator didn't bother putting it on the school roll or in the school email system properly.

"But how am I supposed to learn how to pronounce all of the different letters?" By learning and putting in the effort and not being low-key (and sometimes high-key) racist.

The linguistic dominance that English has over this country is a fucking travesty that limits peoples' ability to communicate properly with people who aren't pākehā, and that's such a shame. It's not only racist in itself, but it actively propagates and necessitates a racist point of view and way of being.

I'm white, but my name has a stràc (the thing above the 'a'), and people just blatantly ignore it in about 80% of text communication with me, emails, letters, texts etc. But because it's not an English letter, it is worth less and can be ignored; it's assumed to not have any meaning because they aren't used in English.

That's annoying, but for me, ultimately not too bad, because there isn't usually any overt ethnic discrimination towards me because of it (except for this one guy from London who was really weird about it). For other people, especially in the context of schooling, it's much more negatively impactful because of the racism that often drives the decision to ignore simple things, conscious or subconscious.

So please, for the love of god, spell peoples' names correctly.

[abeluser]

russian sounds so cool