TATARIʻS reflections

ACTIVITIES:

1. Upoko kupu (Headbands): Kua tata takitai i te ingoa o te au enua Kuki Airani. Tuku ki mua i te katu kia kore te tangata o te katu e kite. Na te ra tangata o te peapa e ui i te uianga kia rauka mai te pauanga " Ae me Kare ". Me ʻAeʻ te pauanga, ka ui akaou i tetai uianga. Me ʻKareʻ te pauanga, ka neke ki tetai tangata ke. Tiaki koe kia tae akaou mai kia koe.

CM211 – REFLECTIONS (Tatari Mitchell)

Memrise was a brand new and an exciting program for me. It has a lot of great ways of making learning easier for the learner. It’s a program I find that will help many languages develop if it is used well.

Memrise was easy to use as the program was practiced through the week with the group. It was a straight forward system that we got into the habit of making sure the created work was always linking. Learning how things came about stored professionally for resources and easy to access made learning the language more interesting and effective for new learners.

I have found that the hardest part was actually creating the resources and making sure the Maori Kuki Airani terms were corrected as many languages were coming from the different islands. Multimedia can be a heavy duty roll if it was for video or audio. Collecting the pictures were more less pressure in using the multimedia on Memrise.

The grammar of the Reo Maori Kuki Airani was the hard core of my interest in this course. I have found that I don’t even know much of my language and its official structure as I have just known to just speak it and hear it correctly. I found that no matter the island and its language the grammar structure will always be the same and it’s the words (kupu) that will change.

Creating the many resources was certainly a plus for me to see as I know it’s a start of a positive move for Te Reo Maori around the world. It is most especially special to see the resources made for our children to use in Maori classes as games or created scripts. The richness of this course are the languages coming not only from Rarotonga. Rich languages from Mitiaro, Mauke, Atiu, Aitutaki and Tongareva made this course special and rich as resources were created.

The sentence structures were powerful to learn and remind us adults what is correct or not. Having different islands in the course was an assume move having the many languages challenged for the sentence structures.

I found myself learning in first class of understanding the difference between ‘a’ and ‘o’ and how many examples and stories were used in the course. I have grown all my life on Rarotonga where my childhood life was all about leading English language power to develop Rarotonga and catch up with the rest of the world. Sadly, Te Reo Maori was not popular, encouraged or forced to all the homes on Rarotonga. It has developed too fast and our mother tough was easy pushed aside by adults, schools and Cook Islands who lived on Rarotonga in my childhood days. This course has opened my heart and soul to develop all the structures happily in the resource making for adults and students.

I find that my Reo Maori Kuki Airani has been safed through the hard work of our Dr Sally Akevai Nicholas. Meitaki maata to this great lady and her team who is working proudly to carry my language in this twenty first century.

Meitaki maata e kia Manuia!