Picture books can help paint and translate a thousand te reo words

Friday, 11 December 2020

COLUMN: A well-known saying has it that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. But pictorial illustrations, can perhaps also assist in understanding, and reinforce the memorisation of, unfamiliar words.

This principal is put to good use in Hoani Waititi’s Te Rangatahi series of Māori language textbooks.

There are teachers who consider these books outdated – but for others, the methodology employed has not been surpassed.

The publication in 1962 of the first book in the series deserves to be considered a landmark event in the revitalization of te reo Māori, and the fact that versions (revised by Beth Ranapia) are still currently in print after nearly sixty years attests to their popularity.

Briefly, for readers unfamiliar with the series, the chapters revolve around the activities of a farming family consisting of Hata, Pani, their two children Tamahae and Mārama, and the friends of those children, Rewi and Mere.

Each chapter begins with a simple Māori text, followed by some explanatory material, exercises and a vocabulary. The stories progress through a range of everyday situations: in the home, at school, farm work, fishing, going to the cinema.

It’s true the content-material is somewhat dated – an ice-cream is priced at eight cents, a pair of shoes at $1:50, for instance – but for some this only adds to the charm of the books. Another criticism might be that rather too many English loan-words and transliterations are used, such as māmā, pāpā and mōrena (“morning”).

None of the outdatedness, however, detracts from the value of the explanatory illustrations.

Because distinctions are made in Māori personal pronouns which are not made in English, the illustrations showing how Māori dual and plural personal pronouns function are particularly worth seeking out.

In te reo, there are four different words which may translate as “we” or “us”.

The words tāua and māua are “dual”, referring to two people only, whilst tātou and mātou refer to three or more people. With tāua and tātou the person or people addressed is/are included, whilst with māua and mātou the person or people addressed is/are not included.

These concepts, confusing perhaps when a verbal explanation is attempted (such as that which has just been given) become perfectly clear when presented pictorially with the characters of the book shown in various groupings and a circular line distinguishing exactly to whom a particular pronoun is being applied.

The focus of these columns is upon clarifying the main differences between English and te reo Māori – but one of the great virtues of the Te Rangatahi books is that verbal explanations are kept to a minimum.