It was really fortunate of me to have come to Aotearoa this year. Maori TV opened in 2004 and just celebrated its anniversary. It's great to have a full te reo Maori (the Maori language) channel and the Kanaka Maori (the native islanders) in Hawaii would be understandably envious. What's so great about having a channel is that it's counted as ONE. I don't know how many people are working at Maori TV, but being ONE it can compete with any US or UK based transnational networks.It's just like the great fiction of the Olympic Games. I only watch Maori TV here.
TV is a great source for learning a language. My social relations being so limited, I will probably end up speaking TV-Maori. But then, my English in the first place was media-educated. Even my Japanese was largely media-educated. (Neither of my parents spoke the NHK Japanese--the counterpart of the BBC English; and I grew up in different places in Japan where the local accents were utterly different one from the other.)
Thank you folks at Maori TV.
