Tēnā koutou - hello everyone.

How are you going in your te reo journey? It’s great to hear people giving te reo a go with me.

For the past two weeks, we’ve given ourselves a bit of a head start in our journey with te reo by looking at words and phrases we might already know.. 

This week, now that we’ve got a few words mastered, I thought we’d take a look at how to form simple sentences - and then how to turn these sentences into questions.

If we think about our basic sentences in English, there is an order that we use - it’s a bit like a simple jigsaw:

Whoever is doing the action + tense (indicating when it happened) + verb (what they’re doing).

Who + tense + verb

He is going.

She is singing.

In te reo, it’s the same jigsaw, just that the pieces go together in a slightly different order.

Tense + verb + who

Kei te haere ia.

He/she is going.

‘Kei te …’ is one way to show it’s happening now.

‘haere’ is a verb meaning to go

‘ia’ is a pronoun meaning he, she, him, her or it.

Getting word order correct in a sentence is simple - it’s just a jigsaw.

You can substitute other words into this simple sentence, and you’re off and running!

Let’s use the word oma, meaning run, and turn this same sentence into a question - it’s easy.

Kei te oma ia. He/she is running.

To turn it into a question, just put a question mark on the end when it’s written, and ask it in a question style of voice if you’re speaking.

Kei te oma ia? Is he/she running?

We’ll do some more simple sentence practice next week. In the meantime, Kia pai te rā. Have a great day.

Check out te wiki o te reo Māori here