Te Reo Progress - February

Update on my te reo learning progress for February 2025

If you haven’t, read my first te reo blogpost before this one so you understand my approach to language learning.

I have made some good progress over the last month, especially with learning new vocabulary. Unfortunately I didn’t put aside any specific time to study and didn’t do as much as I would’ve liked to.

Anki

I’m consistently adding new vocab cards to Anki, balancing words from the frequency list and new words found in my immersion material (TV shows + reading). Usually I’ll spend half an hour to create 30 cards for the next 3 days - in fact it takes an average of a minute per card. Here’s a nice graph showing when and how many cards I created:

Collumn chart of the number of cards I've added to Anki. It shows that every few days I'll add around 30, with an average of 10 per day over 30 days.

I’ve reached a total of 868 flashcards in Anki since I began, 600 of them being out of the frequency list. The amount of ‘Mature’ cards shows how many words I’ve committed to long-term memory, and ‘Young’ are mostly recent ones I’m still learning. This also includes 53 Kīwaha (colloquialisms), which tend to be harder to remember.

Pie graph of the total Anki cards I have in my te reo deck. 723 are mature, and 145 are young.

Immersion + Goals

As I described in my previous blog post, the main driver of actual understanding of the language is immersion through comprehensible content. As mentioned above, I haven’t done nearly as much of this as I wanted to, so I’m setting a goal for 25 hours (counting everything) across the next month. Some days are much busier than others and it really just depends on what else is going on in my life for how much time I can spend learning te reo.

For that goal I will need to have an average of 45 minutes each day - around 10 more than my average throughout February. This should be a mix of reading (below) and listening (Disney & Darwin + Newts) along with Anki and some grammar study. On the bus to work I usually do an episode of the Everyday Māori podcast and my Anki reviews.

Lute

I’m in progress of writing a blogpost dedicated to Lute, but for now just know it’s a tool for reading in other languages with an integrated pop-up dictionary (hover over the words) and statistics.

In the last month I read 9485 words across 11 days. 15 minutes of reading an existing text is around 1000 kupu, however when I am starting a new text all unknown words have to be filled out. Luckily they integrate an embedded version of any dictionary (I use Te Aka) so it’s mostly click the word, and copy/paste the definitions.

They’ve also recently updated to add a quick way to send a new word along with it’s sentence to Anki which saves a lot of time.

Over the next month I’m going to try set aside 10-15 minutes most days to read with Lute, as well as get at least 3 new texts with new kupu definitions added. Below shows the stats of my top 8 texts along with their status bar showing details on how well I know the kupu they include. A large percentage of the kupu are green (‘well known’) mainly because that’s the 600 most frequent kupu in te reo Māori that I’ve learned.

List of 8 texts: some Māori legends like Tāwhirimātea, 2 translated Stuff articles and a few articles from Māori publications. Most of their word counts are between 700 and 1500, and they all have less than 25% unknown words.

This is what a page looks like while reading:

Page 3 of Te Ika a Māui with many words highlighted with different colours to indicate how well they are known.

Conclusion

The main problem I’ve had this month was consistency in doing listening and reading immersion. Even though I find them enjoyable, other things take up my free time and I don’t spend as much time as I want to. So I’ve set a few mini goals for March:

#te reo Māori   #linguistics