I'm Actually Taking a Class, You Guys

Tēnā koutou katoa! (or if it's just Mom reading: Tēnā koe e whaea!)

Just in case you thought I was spending the term bumming around New Zealand, let me prove you wrong by telling you about my first week of Māori class! Warning: wall o' text ahead.

To preface, I've always loved different languages, and this drove me to study French and Latin in high school (and via cognates, Spanish), as well as Japanese and a little Korean in college. It all probably started with me making weird sounds with my mouth when I was little. Anyhow, I was pretty excited to dive into a whole new language that had tons of new vocabulary and grammatical structures to pick up.

An overview of the course schedule: we meet from 10:00 to 1:00, Tuesday through Thursday. Our lecturer, usually Margaret Mutu, goes over two lessons over the course of two hours, which are often centered on a key aspect of Māori grammar such as focus. Though this sounds dry, there are always gazillions of examples to illustrate the details, which are usually short sentences like ko te wahine e kai ana ('(as for) the woman, she's eating'), as well as interesting/amusing interludes about aspects of Māori culture. After the lecture, our TA spends an hour going over a bunch of exercises to cement the lessons in our heads and help us with some of the trickier vocabulary (like all the pronouns...so many pronouns).

First things first: the sound system (check it out here). Māori has the five vowels a e i o u, roughly pronounced 'ah', 'eh', 'ee', 'oh' (or 'aw'), and 'oo'. Though that is way simpler than English's nightmarish vowel system (this is why so many people struggle to pick up a 'real' American/English accent), I'm still having trouble with recognizing some of the diphthongs, which are two-vowel sequences like ai and ae. Those two in particular, as well as au vs. ao, are a struggle for me, but I hope that listening to more Māori, perhaps via this TV channel, will help me acclimatize. As for the consonants, they are all pretty straightforward (e.g. p t k f), though I do enjoy the ng sound (pronounced like the last sound of 'thing') in words such as ngaoki ('to crawl').

On the grammar side of Māori, the most difficult thing for me to wrap my head around so far is probably the Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) order. This means that the first thing you say in a sentence is (almost) always the verb phrase. For instance, kua patu au i ngā karoro translates literally to something like 'have kill I [OBJ] the seagulls' (i.e. 'I have killed the seagulls'). Only about 9% of the world's languages have this order, and English only has it in some questions like 'Are you insane?' Despite this temporary difficulty, I hope that by the end of this course, will think I in VSO order.

As I mentioned before, we occasionally discuss certain aspects of Māori culture, as would be expected in any good language class. For instance, when introducing yourself in Māori, it is most common to talk about your local/tribal identity (e.g. iwi and hapū), rather than simply saying your name. As a very white person with no tribe to which to lay claim (I don't think Stewart really counts), this seemed like a pretty interesting way of going about introductions.

However, sometimes our lecturer attempts to link the language and culture a bit more closely than we linguistic students are willing to accept. For instance, I think Professor Mutu drew a connection between a certain selfishness ('in Māori, it's all about me!') and the language's system of demonstratives ('this [near me],' 'that [near addressee],' 'that [distant]'), and she said that this apparent self-centeredness is reflected in Māori culture. In response, I thought about the fact that similar 'selfish' demonstratives are pretty common among languages in general, but of course none of us linguistics students spoke up for fear of derailing the class. Still, we'll keep an eye out for similar suspicious hypotheses in the future.

Now for my most pressing worry with this class...I've had to start up the old flashcards again to review the nearly 200 new words we've learned this week. Anki is a great little flashcard program that has saved me lots of paper, and it is terrific at forcing me to do spaced repetition, but it doesn't spare me from actually putting in the time and effort.

I've gone over this card at least four times by now. I think it's going to be a few more years
until they figure out how to directly upload vocab to your brain, à la Matrix.

Anyhow, that's how my Māori class has been going. Wonderful. Lots more to talk about for this weekend's activities, so expect more updates (and photos) soon! Ka kite!