Originally Posted by
BlackPeter
I don't contest that English is today a much more useful language as Maori ... as a means to communicate with our traditional trading partners and as the international language of science ... many centuries of suppressing, enslaving and occupying other cultures and people clearly paid off for the British ... but this was not your argument, was it?
I was just trying to just put your argument into perspective.
Still not sure, whether a bunch of English speaking people are the best jurors to objectively assess whether it might be beneficial for others to learn Maori as well ... it is after all one of our official languages - and hey, it might be a sign of respect for the other part of our society as well as help to better talk with and understand some of our closer neighbors .... I think Maori is not too far away from e.g. Malay and / or Indonesian, and there are plenty of people speaking these languages.
Whatever it is - I come from a culture where it is quite normal to learn already at school several other foreign languages - and I can tell you, that although I didn't particularly enjoyed learning languages at school, I don't consider any of the languages I learned so far (Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese) as a waste of time ... each of them did help me to better understand other people and cultures, though admittedly the British with their imperial desires and their BREXIT mania still feel a bit strange to me ...). As well - if you speak two languages, learning a third is only half the effort and it helps you as well to better understand your mother tongue.
While I know that change is difficult and people tend to find millions of reasons to avoid it (and lets face it - New Zealand is a society where many people don't even speak one language properly) - why not give it at least a try to open our horizons? It is not that hard - according to Dr. Google are roughly 60% of the world population at least bilingual. We could do it as well, can't we?