So I think I forgot that I had a blog. Or actually, I wasn’t doing a lot of te reo Māori, and so I had nothing to write about. But that has all changed!… at least for this week…
One of the hard things about language learning is knowing whether you are actually learning the language.
When I study grammar and vocab, I feel that I am learning because I can point to tangible things that I have seen or heard that I didn’t know before. But then on the other hand I do not feel I have really learnt anything at all because I don’t feel like it has made any change to my ability – for instance, what is the chances I will remember all these grammatical nuances I just read about?
If I listen to and read materials in Māori, I feel like theoretically I must be improving my skill, but on the other hand it is hard to say what was actually learnt; if I understand it I feel I must have learnt nothing because I already know it, and if I don’t understand it then I feel I must have learnt nothing because how could I?
The end result is that it’s very hard to plan learning activities because its hard to tell whether you’re learning anything by doing them! What do you do that makes you feel like you’re really getting somewhere in your language learning?
Whakawhiti i Te Arawhiti 
Kia ora e hoa
Doing the same thing over and over again allows me to see progress. For example, I will listen to an episode of Ako lots of times and I find that I understand more the more I listen.
I also found that this year’s Kura Reo was way easier than last year’s. Last year it took me a week to recover ā-wairua, this year hardly any time at all.
I am not sure that understanding is necessary for some type(s) of learning. It could be that the brain is being rewired by the act of listening. He whakapae noa iho
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Kia ora mo to whakaaro!
I think that my main learning strategy is based on what you say about the brain rewiring – I just do whatever and desperately hope that my brain knows what it is doing and that it is sorting all this stuff out for me somewhere in the background!
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Kia ora! I think that I feel I’m learning if I’ve understood something a bit better–even if it’s just how one word links to another, or part of another word, or that a word actually has some meaning in terms of what I already know i te reo Māori, as opposed to being a random string of syllables. Plus I feel more confident now that I am learning stuff, as I’m increasingly able to understand things, both through listening and reading. Lots of reading and listening do add up over time! Ngā mihi ki a koe, ki a koutou hoki e whai wāhi i tēnei whakawhiti whakaaro.
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