Verbs and Tenses

Verbs are an essential part in building sentences.  In English a sentences is not considered a true sentence if it does not have a verb. However, as we discovered in the information on the page about Nouns and Adjectives,  there is no verb 'to be' in te reo Māori. Many of the English sentneces have the verb 'to be' in them. It is what is called an 'irregular' verb and so often the form it takes is different e.g. I am happy, You are clever, she is hungry.  Also, we are taught fairly early on, in simplistic terms that a verb is an action word or a 'doing' word and 'am', 'is', 'are' don't seem to come across as actions so we don't recognise that 'to be' is a verb. 

The great thing about te reo Māori is that verbs are entirely regular - there are no surprises!  Verbs don't even change their form in the present, past or future forms; there are regular tense markers that indicate whether a speaker is talking in the past, present or future.  In addition, many nouns are also verbs, so no extra words to learn.  However, the place that the verb goes into the sentence is different to English which can cause some confusion.