In the following sections we’ll learn how to build verb sentences, like these:
Kei te oma te ngeru
The cat is running
Kua kai a Maia
Maia has eaten
We’ll look at the differences between the two languages; Māori is a lot more straightforward and neater than English!
We'll introduce new concepts as we go, such as common nouns, determiners and pronouns.
Once we’ve got the basics, we’ll look at adding more information to make sentences like these:
Kei te oma te ngeru ki te whare
The cat is running to the house
Kua kai a Maia i ngā panana
Maia has eaten the bananas
I mōhio au ki tōna ingoa
I knew his name
Māori verbs can be divided into three groups:
Action
Experience
Stative
We are going to look at Action and Experience verbs first.
Stative verbs are used in a different way, and it is much easier to understand them once we have a good grasp of the other two types. We’ll return to stative verbs later.
All of the examples in this section will be ‘active’ verb sentences. We can say that all of these will be ‘in the active voice’.
There is another, quite different, way to build verb sentences so that they are ‘in the passive voice’. These are called ‘passive’ verb sentences.
Learning active verb sentences first makes it much easier to understand and learn the passive structure later on.