How many Māori words do you know?
Te Reo Māori · a two-minute vocabulary test · free, no sign-up
You will see 34 words, one at a time — about two minutes. Tap I know it only if you know what the word means; otherwise tap No. 6 of them are made up to look like Māori, so don't guess: a yes to a word that does not exist lowers your score.
On a keyboard: Y or → for yes, N or ← for no, Backspace to go back one.
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Your Māori vocabulary
Where your words are
How many of the words in each part of the list you know, from the most common down.
Learn the words you are missing, in order
The course deals this same list from the top down, one lesson a day, with the grammar that holds the words together. Or read the list itself: the most common Māori words, with translations.
About the Māori test
The test covers the course's te reo Māori list of about 2,000 words, so it can tell a beginner from a confident intermediate learner; past that, you will simply reach the ceiling. Words are shown with their macrons, and a macron changes the word: if you know keke but not kēkē, say yes only to the one you know. The made-up words were written to look like Māori and then checked three ways — against the course's own text, against every word of Māori Wikipedia, and against Te Aka Māori Dictionary — so none of them is a real word. There is no coverage figure, because there is no corpus of everyday spoken Māori large enough to measure one honestly; how many Māori words you need measures coverage on written Māori instead.
How the number is worked out
The test draws on the top 2,006 entries of the course's Māori frequency list, cut into 4 bands. Names, conjugated forms glossed as forms of another word, and grammatical particles are set aside, because none of them is a word you could be asked about on its own; what is left is 1,910 words, and that is the most this test can measure.
| Band | List ranks | Words it stands for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1–250 | 236 |
| 2 | 251–500 | 249 |
| 3 | 501–1,000 | 498 |
| 4 | 1,001–2,006 | 927 |
Each attempt shows 7 words chosen at random from every band, and 6 made-up words, all shuffled together. Your yes-rate on each band is corrected by your yes-rate on the made-up words — the share of the words you do not know that you would say yes to anyway — using the standard correction for guessing: known share = (yes-rate on the band − yes-rate on made-up words) ÷ (1 − yes-rate on made-up words), never below zero. Each band's corrected share is multiplied by the number of words it stands for, and the bands are added up. If more than four in ten made-up words get a yes, no number is given, because there is then no telling knowledge from guessing.
With 7 words a band the test is quick, and that makes it an estimate, not a census: two attempts can differ by a few hundred words on a short list and by more on the wide top bands of a long one, so take it twice and split the difference if you want a steadier figure. It measures recognition — whether you know a word when you see it — which always runs ahead of the words you can produce yourself.
There is no coverage figure for this language: no corpus of it is large enough to say how much of ordinary speech a given number of words accounts for, and an invented one would be worse than none.
There is no ranking against other learners here, because we do not have that data and will not invent it.