200 Hours Learning Te Reo

I have spent 200 hours learning te reo Māori over the last 8 months, an average of 45 minutes each day. This includes immersion in tv shows, movies, vocab study and reading. The following chart is from the Refold Tracker app, which I’ve used to track the time I spend learning te reo.

Donut chart showing the proportions of time of different activities.

Vocab Study & Reading

I use the digital flashcard app Anki for vocab study. Since I started, I’ve added 10 new words every day which I get from immersion, mostly while reading. Once I finished mining all the unknown words from Pounamu Pounamu at the end of July, I took a break from learning new words:

Bar graph showing number of added cards. The first 20 days of August have almost no new cards, but the next 10 days have an average of 10 each day.

After reflecting, I cannot continue with how I used to mine words from books. Since they were physical books, I was manually creating Anki cards and writing in the example sentences, and that took a lot of time. You can see this in the first graph: 16.2% of my 200 hours (32 hours) has been spent creating flashcards. This is not sustainable, and reduces time spent actually learning te reo.

I’ve decided to instead spend that time reading online using Lute which has an export to Anki feature. Now the thing is reading enough new articles to find a sufficient amount of new words, which will keep me consistently coming back to it.

I also purchased Hare Pota me te Whatu Manapou, and read the first 2 chapters. I understand most of it but it’s more advanced than I am at right now, so I won’t be reading it very often. Also J.K. Rowling, which isn’t that great.

At the end of August, I know 2000 words, 200 actively learning and there are 175 that I gave up on (Anki leeches). Continuing at the same rate, I should reach 3000 near the end of this year!

Listening Immersion

In my last update, I said that I wanted to increase how much content I was immersing in with natural speech. In some ways, I did this but not as much as I had hoped.

In July I watched 12 episodes of the Waka Huia documentary series.
I’ve been listening to the Nē? Podcast, which includes some conversations in te reo.
I watched Ka Whawhai Tonu, and rewatched Encanto and Frozen in te reo Māori.

Here’s to the next 50 hours of ako, and the 50th anniversary of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori!