How long does it take to learn te reo Māori?

Nobody has measured it for te reo Māori, so every figure is an estimate. The best-known published guide, written for English, puts A2 at about 180–200 hours of study from zero and B1 at 350–400. In one structured daily course at its full lesson length, the lessons alone to the end of B1 take roughly 105–155 hours: about ten months at one 20–30 minute lesson a day, or about two and a half years at ten minutes a day. Listening, review and speaking with people come on top.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 10 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

The short answer

If you study every day, a beginner level (A1) is a matter of months, an elementary level (A2) is around a year at a modest pace, and an intermediate level (B1), where you can handle everyday situations and tell a simple story, is one to three years depending on how much time you give it. The figures below are worked out from one real course, lesson by lesson, rather than guessed:

Those are course lessons only, done every day. Where the numbers come from, and what they leave out, is the rest of this page.

One thing you will not find here is a difficulty ranking. The usual source for those, the US Foreign Service Institute, does not list Māori at all; why, and what is easy and hard about the language instead, is in is te reo Māori hard to learn? This page is about time.

What the published hours per level say

The most widely quoted figures for the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) come from Cambridge English, which publishes how many guided learning hours, meaning lessons and supervised study, a learner might need to reach each level from complete beginner. The hours are cumulative:

Cambridge is careful to call these a guideline only, and names what moves them: your language-learning background, how intensively you study, your age, and how much you study or hear the language outside lessons. They are also figures for English, set against Cambridge’s own exams. Nobody has published equivalent figures for te reo Māori, and they should not be read as a Māori timetable. They are useful as an order of magnitude: reaching B1 in any language takes hundreds of hours, not dozens.

Would Māori be faster or slower? The honest answer is parts of both. Reading aloud and the basic verb patterns come quickly, and almost none of the vocabulary can be guessed from English, which is slow. The Spanish version of this question has a published government figure to start from; Māori does not.

How long the Verbavia course takes, level by level

Verbavia (our own course) teaches te reo Māori from the first word to the end of B1 in 311 hand-written lessons, and its level boundaries are fixed, so the time can be counted rather than estimated. The levels fall like this:

Every lesson can be taken at one of three lengths, chosen in Settings. The catch, and the reason this page counts minutes rather than lessons, is that a shorter lesson does not make a shorter course. A short lesson covers part of a grammar point, so each of the 311 written lessons is spread over two or three days:

The shorter settings are a gentler course, not a lighter one: they bring in fewer new words a day and give each grammar point more practice before the next. Multiply it out and the hours of lessons per level look like this:

Set against Cambridge’s 350–400 hours for B1, that gap is the point: course lessons are a large part of the work, and nowhere near all of it.

10 or 20 minutes a day: weeks and months to each level

Here is the same course turned into a calendar, at one lesson a day, every day. Ten minutes a day is the Essentials setting, twenty is Balanced, and the last two rows are for people with more time:

Two adjustments make these more realistic. If you study six days a week rather than seven, add about a sixth. And if you already know some Māori, you do not have to start at lesson one: a short placement test at the start of the course lets you skip ahead to the level that fits.

What you can do after 1, 3, 6 and 12 months

These are the points each pace reaches in the course, with sentences from the lessons you will have done by then. They describe what you will have been taught and practised, not a promise of what you will say without stopping to think. The lesson numbers are the course’s 311 written lessons, whichever setting you use.

After one month

At either pace you can greet people and say who you are. At twenty minutes a day you can also say what is happening, with the verb first:

After three months

After six months

At twenty minutes a day you have finished A1, which takes in the lines of a pepeha and sentences with “if” in them. At ten minutes a day you are two thirds of the way there, and can say what did not happen:

After twelve months

At ten minutes a day you can give a reason and an opinion. At twenty you have been through the everyday situations, from paying in a shop to saying where you are from:

And at the end of B1, whichever pace got you there, you are telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end:

How long Māori programmes take

Classes publish their own hours, and they show how widely “a beginner course” can vary. Neither of these uses CEFR levels, so they cannot be lined up exactly with the tables above. Details are as of October 2026:

• Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, Te Ara Reo Māori Level 1 (part-time, online): 38 weeks, with on average 3 hours of online classes and 14 hours of self-directed learning a week, for 60 credits. That is about 650 hours on the wānanga’s own averages. By the end, it says, learners can use te reo Māori words and simple sentences, introduce themselves and their whānau, and talk about numbers, colours, days, months and seasons. It has no fees for eligible learners in New Zealand.
• Reo Kōrero, Te Huanui Level 1 (live online classes): 21 weeks of a two-hour weekly session and at least three hours a week of your own practice, which is at least 105 hours. It is the first of three levels, the third being conversational reo.

The six-fold difference between those two is not a sign that one is doing it wrong. One leads to a New Zealand certificate with most of its hours in study at home; the other is a weekly class built around speaking. Both put a beginner course in the hundreds of hours, which is consistent with everything else on this page. The full range of routes is compared in the best way to learn te reo Māori.

Course time is not the whole story

The tables count lessons. Four things make the real figure larger, or the result better, and usually both:

• Review. Every lesson starts with whatever words are due for review, with no cap. Miss a week and the next lessons run long while you catch up. Review is the part that makes words stay, so it is time well spent, but it is time.
• Listening. Lessons give you clear, careful speech. Ordinary speech is faster, and only lots of it gets you used to that: te reo radio, television and recordings.
• Speaking with people. A course can teach you to understand, read and write; speaking at conversational speed comes from conversations. The Verbavia Māori course has no speaking section, so this part has to come from a class, a group or the people around you.
• Vocabulary. Very few Māori words can be guessed from English, so words take longer to settle than in French or Spanish. Which ones matter most is the subject of how many Māori words you need.

A useful rule of thumb from Cambridge’s caveats: the more you hear and use the language outside lessons, the less the lesson hours matter. Someone with ten minutes of course a day and a weekly class will often get further than someone with thirty minutes of course alone.

Where to start

1. A daily course. The free te reo Māori course from Verbavia works in any browser, including on a phone. Every lesson is written by hand, every example is voiced by Papa Reo, Te Hiku Media’s native te reo voice, and the grammar is explained in English.
2. Measure where you are. The two-minute Māori vocabulary test estimates how many common words you already know. Take it again every few months to see the change.
3. A plan for the first month. Learn Māori for beginners lays out thirty days at 15–20 minutes a day.
4. People. Add a class or a group as soon as you can, for the speaking no course can give you.

And when your Māori still feels small, there is a sentence for that, from the lesson on talking about learning: He iti taku reo. ‘I have only a little.’

Sources

1. Cambridge English Support Site: Guided learning hours (updated 23 October 2023; cumulative hours per CEFR level: A1 90–100, A2 180–200, B1 350–400; “a guideline only”). Read from the Internet Archive copy of 28 December 2024.
2. Te Wānanga o Aotearoa: Te Ara Reo Māori Level 1 — 38 weeks part-time online, on average 3 hours of classes and 14 hours of self-directed learning a week, 60 credits, learning outcomes, no fees for eligible learners (checked October 2026).
3. Reo Kōrero: Te Huanui — 21 weeks, a two-hour weekly online session and at least three hours of practice a week; levels 1 to 3 (checked October 2026).
4. Foreign Service Institute language learning timelines, US Department of State (archived December 2023; Māori not listed).