Kia ora and welcome to the first in a series of daily lessons learning te reo Māori.

We are going to start at the very very beginning with the most basic Māori words and sentences.

So lets start with a couple of words you already know:

Kia ora! 
Hello!

"Ora" is the word for healthy or well, and "kia" is a kind of gentle encouragement. So "kia ora" means: "May you be well!"

You have probably seen this word, "kia" in another sentence: "kia kaha", which means "be strong!"

If you meet a friend and want to say hello, you would say: 

Kia ora e hoa!
Hello friend!

The word for friend is hoa but we also have this tricky little word e.

This is a particle, which is a little word that adds meaning to the words around. A particle of sand is a ittle wee hbit of sand, and a particle in a sentence is a little wee word.

This where te reo Māori is tricky, because there many paricles, a, o, i, e... and they can have different meanings in different situations. So, sometimes, e can be a command, like e tū! stand up! And other times can indicate past, and sometimes it can indicate the person who did somerhing. So knowing the partucles and their various meanings is one of the difficulties of learning Māori.

But in this situation, e is a particle of address. It used when we are talking to someone. So, if you are saying hello to a friendk you don't say kia ora hoa - we need to say: kia ora e hoa! Hello frieind.

But what if you meet several friends?

In that situation, ytou would say:

Kia ora e hoa mā!
Hello frieinds!

This is another situation where a word can have several differenrt meanings. Mā can mean "white" or "clean", so kia ora e hoa mā could mean "hello white friends" or "hello clean friends", but in this situation, mā is used to indicate the plural - that there is more than one friend.