Learn Māori for beginners: your first 30 days

Start with the sounds, not the words. Spend your first week on pronunciation and greetings, the second on saying who you are and where you are from, the third on describing things and saying what is happening, and the fourth on the past, the future and the words for we. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is enough. Thirty days will not make you fluent, but it will let you read any Māori word aloud correctly, greet people properly, introduce yourself, and build the core sentence patterns the rest of the language stands on.

Updated 6 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 30-day plan at a glance

Each week has one job. The grammar follows the order Verbavia’s te reo Māori course teaches it in, which is the order in which each pattern needs the ones before it.

How to follow the plan

Our first recommendation is to follow it with the free te reo Māori course from Verbavia (our own course), because the plan is built on that course’s order: its first thirty lessons run from greetings to ka, the same ground as the four weeks below. Every lesson is written by hand, every example is spoken by Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media, and the grammar is explained in English. New words come in frequency order, from the list of the most common Māori words, and each lesson has reading, listening and writing sections. It is free on the web and works in any browser, including on a phone. The plan itself works with any course or textbook, though: the order of the grammar is what matters.

If you would rather compare other routes first, the guides to the best way to learn Māori and free Māori courses set out the alternatives, including in-person classes. Whichever you use, keep a copy of Te Aka Māori Dictionary open: it is free online, and it is the place to check a word or a macron.

A daily routine of 15 to 20 minutes

Short and daily beats long and occasional, because most of what a beginner does is remember. A day looks like this:

1. Review, 5 minutes. Go back over yesterday’s words and sentences before anything new. Say each one aloud.
2. One new thing, 10 minutes. One lesson, or one grammar point from this week’s list, with a handful of new words.
3. Listen and say, 5 minutes. Play the examples, repeat them, and write one sentence of your own with the new pattern.

On one day each weekend, add half an hour for the guide in that week’s row of the table. The guides are where the background lives: what the words mean, where they come from, and how they are used.

Day 1: measure where you are starting

Take the two-minute Māori vocabulary test before you learn anything. It shows you 34 words, six of them made up, and estimates how many words of the course’s list of about 2,000 you already recognise. A complete beginner will score close to nothing, and that is the point: you take it again on day 30. If you have lived in New Zealand you will probably know more than you think, because New Zealand English has borrowed many everyday words, such as kai ‘food’, whānau ‘family’ and mahi ‘work’. The guide to Māori words in New Zealand English lists them.

Then say the sentence you will be able to say properly by the end of the month:

Week 1 (days 1–7): the sounds and the greetings

Goal: read any Māori word aloud and greet one person, two people or a group.

Te reo Māori is spelt the way it sounds. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington counts fifteen sounds: five vowels, eight consonants and two digraphs, wh and ng. A long vowel is marked with a macron, and the macron changes the word: keke ‘cake’ and kēkē ‘armpit’ are different words. Spend days 1 to 3 on the Māori pronunciation guide: pure vowels, long against short, wh as an f in most of the country, ng at the start of a word as in ngā ‘the (plural)’, and the tapped r.

Spend days 4 to 7 on greetings. The course starts here too, because a greeting is the first thing you need, and because greeting by number is the first piece of grammar: Māori has a word for you two.

The guide to Māori greetings adds farewells and how to open and sign off an email, ending with ngā mihi ‘regards, thanks’. For the weekend reading, is te reo Māori hard to learn? sets out what comes easily and what will take longer, so the next three weeks hold no surprises.

Week 2 (days 8–14): who you are and where you are from

Goal: give your name, ask someone theirs, point people out, and read the lines of a pepeha.

The first sentence pattern in the course is the ko sentence. It has no verb: ko marks the specific person or thing you are naming, and the sentence works like an equals sign. Learn the pronouns au or ahau (I), koe (you, one person) and ia (he or she), and the pointing words tēnei (this, near me) and tērā (that, over there).

The same pattern carries a pepeha, the traditional introduction that names your mountain, river and people before your name. Once you can say Ko Mere tōku ingoa., you can read every line:

Read Pepeha: how to introduce yourself in Māori this week, including its section on what published guidance advises for people who are not Māori, who are often encouraged to give a different kind of introduction. The course teaches the full pepeha later, after possession, but the pattern is the one you learn this week. Two guides go with it: Māori family words, for tōku whānau ‘my family’ and ōku mātua ‘my parents’, and Māori place names, because a pepeha is full of them and most are built from ordinary words.

Week 3 (days 15–21): describing things and saying what is happening

Goal: describe and classify things, use the in the singular and plural, say what someone is doing now, and ask what and where.

The second is sentence starts with he. Where ko names a particular one, he says what kind of thing something is, or what it is like. Then the articles: te is the for one thing and ngā for more than one, and the noun itself usually stays the same. Then the first tense marker, kei te, for what is going on now. It comes before the verb, and the verb comes before the person doing it.

Notice that the question and its answer have the same shape: He aha tēnei? is answered by He pukapuka tēnei. ‘This is a book.’ You swap the question word for the answer and keep everything else.

Add the numbers this week. Māori counts with ten words and builds the rest from them, so they take a few days rather than weeks; Māori numbers, days of the week and months covers them, along with the rule for counting things, as in e rua ngā whare ‘two houses’.

Week 4 (days 22–28): time, place and the words for we

Goal: say where someone is, was or will be, use the right word for we, and talk about something that happened.

Three small words carry place and time together: kei for where something is now, i for where it was and hei for where it will be. Then the pronouns. Māori has separate words for two people and for three or more, and two kinds of we: one that includes the person you are speaking to and one that leaves them out. Finally, i before a verb puts it in the past.

The pronouns are the hardest part of the month. Learn tāua and māua first, as a pair, and ask yourself one question each time: is the person I am talking to included?

For the weekend, read something that is not grammar. Whakataukī collects well-known Māori proverbs with their published sources, Matariki explains the stars and the words of the Māori New Year, and Māori words with no English equivalent covers words such as mana and aroha, which you will meet constantly and which no single English word translates.

Days 29–30: the future, a review, and the test again

Day 29 adds the last marker of the month, ka, for what is going to happen. With kei te and i from earlier weeks, you have three of the markers that carry tense in Māori.

On day 30, do three things. Write five or six lines about yourself using only what you have learned: a greeting, your name, where you are from, what you are doing and where you will be tomorrow. Say them aloud, against the recordings. Then take the vocabulary test again and compare the number with day 1. The test is an estimate, so if the figure matters to you, take it twice and split the difference.

If you want context for what comes next, how many people speak Māori explains who you will be speaking with, and Māori vs Hawaiian shows where te reo sits among its Polynesian relatives.

What 30 days will and won’t get you

Be honest with yourself about the size of a month. At the end of this plan you should be able to:

• read any Māori word aloud, with its long vowels;
• greet one person, two or a group, and sign off an email;
• say who you are and where you are from, and ask others;
• describe things with he and name them with ko;
• say what is happening, what happened and what will happen, in simple sentences;
• recognise a couple of hundred common words.

You will not be able to follow a conversation at normal speed, a news bulletin or a speech on a marae. Possession, with its two kinds of my, the passive and most of the vocabulary still lie ahead. The course runs to the end of B1, an intermediate level, and thirty days is the start of it.

A couple of hundred words is still a real foundation, because the commonest words do a disproportionate amount of the work. In our own measurement, the 100 most common words on the list make up about half of the running text of Māori Wikipedia; how many Māori words you need sets out the figures and how they were measured.

You are also joining a lot of people. In New Zealand’s 2023 Census, more than 200,000 people, about 4.3% of the population, said they could hold a conversation in te reo Māori. The most useful thing you can do after day 30 is to keep the daily routine going and find some of them to speak with.

Sources

1. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington: Te reo Māori pronunciation guide (fifteen distinct sounds; the macron marks a long vowel)
2. RNZ (10 October 2024). Concern over low percentage of Māori speaking te reo (2023 Census: more than 200,000 people, 4.28%, can hold a conversation in te reo).
3. Te Hiku Media: Papa Reo, a language platform led by Te Hiku Media
4. Te Aka Māori Dictionary (free online)