Section outline

  • Water Whanau Te Reo Phrase of the Water


    Use your Water Card and collect a token to acknowledge your use of Te Reo. In your Monday Session 1 class the phrase of the week will be introduced. Monday is practice day. Then try your best to use the phrase in conversation over the week and collect a token each time. 

    Your teachers are also part of this - catch them trying to use the phrase in conversation.

    We would like to acknowledge Radio New Zealand and Hemi Kelly, to whom resources we are using.  Hemi's a lecturer in Te Ara Poutama - the Faculty of Māori & Indigenous Development at Auckland University of Technology, and his book A Māori Phrase a Day: 365 Phrases to Kickstart Your Reo will be released on January 7.

    • Maori Phrase of the Week (10th-15th Feb)

      Kei te pēhea koe?

      Translation: How are you? 

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      Kei te pēhea koe? How are you? 

      "It's a good follow-on from 'kia ora'", Hemi says.

      "You can use it any time of the day - and quite often it's shortened to just 'kei te pēhea' - so we leave off the pronoun, 'you', and we're just saying 'how's it?'"

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      Click the play of the sound file below to hear Hēmi pronounce this phrase and take you through any pronunciation nuances


    • Te Reo Phrase of the Week: Kei te pēhea koe? URL

    • Maori Phrase of the Week (17th- 21st Feb

      Kia pai te rā

      Translation:  'have a good day'
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      "There's a familiar word there - 'pai' - which means 'good'", says Hēmi. "'Ra' is 'day' - so we're telling someone to have a good day: 'kia pai te rā."

      It's a sentence that can be used at any time of day - and a dextrous one too.

      "What we can do is take out that word 'rā' and we can put in another word."

      "If we want to say have a good meeting - 'kia pai te hui'".

      "Have a good trip - 'kia pai te haere'. So we can change that last word for different contexts.

      "You'll normally hear it when you're saying goodbye to someone, or maybe when you're signing off an email, if it's not too late in the day."

      "You can also change 'ra' for 'po', which is 'night.'"

      ===



    • Te Reo Phrase of the Week : Kia pai te rā URL

    • Maori Phrase of the Week (21st-28th Feb)

      Taihoa, kāore e roa!

      Translation: hang on, hold up, wait

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      "Taihoa' means 'hang on, hold up, wait' - and 'kāore e roa' means 'I won't be long'".

      "If someone's knocking on the bathroom door you can say 'Taihoa, kāore e roa! Or you could just take that first word - 'taihoa!'"

      How much should we roll our 'r' in 'roa'? "It's rolled - but not THAT much", Hēmi says. "It's not a violent roll - it's a pacifist roll!"

      "Everywhere the 'r' is present, it's always rolled."

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    • Maori Phrase of the Week (2-6th March)

      Kei te hiakai koe?


      Are you hungry? If we think about what we've learned already, we can start to figure out what this is asking, Hēmi says.

      "The 'kei te' is the present, doing. The 'koe' is you. So we're asking you a question."

      "And we've got the word 'kai' in there - a lot of us know this to be food".

      "'Hiakai' is to want food, or to be hungry - so we're saying 'are you hungry?' 'Ke te hiakai koe?'"

      "We put that little 'hia' in front of a noun like 'kai', we're saying 'want food' or to be hungry."

      We do the same with the word 'moi' - sleep.

      "'Hiamoi' - to be sleepy."

      "Your answer might be 'āe' - for yes - or 'kāo' for no."

      Blending the vowels in words like "koe"

      "We see a lot of vowels sitting together than make one sound in Māori."

      "If you're new to the language, go back to the vowel sounds: ah, eh, ee, oh, oo."

      "Here we've got 'oh' and 'eh' - so we roll them together to make that sound: 'koe."'

      "It's not like 'kway' - it's fluid and rolls into itself."