Nickie Muir: Effort worth it to gain language fluency

Prime Minister John Key

Once I had the pain and pleasure of having a bit to do with a heroin addict's son.

I was young and I should have just called the police - instead I spent long afternoons with the 8-year-old boy avoiding what we both knew was going on at home. He'd show up at mine and simply say: "Mum's gone to boringness again."

I'm in boringness with Mr Key - drugged on the stupefying cultural arrogance that seems to float smog-like over this National Party cohort.

Apparently Mr Key told a 16-year-old girl that her suggestion of a Maori month instead of just a week would be "a bit boring".

His spokespeople who must see the implications of his value of this part of the community and how that might look to parts of the country like Northland were quick to rephrase. What Mr Key had really meant to say, they said, was that having a whole te reo Maori month would "lose some of the impact".

Or perhaps that we, as a nation really like Maori culture when it contributes to marketing and tourism but we don't really want to engage in any meaningful way with the language or the people who speak it. There was such a deeply rooted sense of "other" in Key's comment that undermines any hope that one day we will all be fluent bilingual speakers of our two national languages.

There is little inspiration or motivation to do the hard graft in learning a language if it's considered by our leaders as, well, a bit boring. Te reo under this paradigm is nothing more necessary than a cursory nod in the form of a week of token gestures. It tells us that a real world engagement with te reo is somehow not necessary and a bit passe.

From experience, there needs to be a mixture of deep desire, an intrinsic motivation or an understanding of the beauty and benefits it will bring in order to gain fluency in a language.

For me, in Spanish - it was an obsession with Pablo Neruda's poetry and wanting to be able to read it in the original. There also has to be some form of compulsion - suddenly having to share a flat with a friend who spoke no English and had dubious friends who needed to be managed gave me the impetus to get good quickly at te reo paniora. The last aspect in ensuring that a language is acquired is opportunity to use it - a circle of speakers who are generous enough to be patient and kind and who actively want you to join their company - who are willing to put up with your misunderstanding of jokes and general linguistic clumsiness. Kids have the advantage here because they're cute and their communication errors are endearing. The beauty and insight inherent in te reo in the very little I know reward in ways that tie soul to soil, and as a Pakeha - it's time for me to step up not side-step what can only enrich my and indeed all our lives.