daily-reo

Autaia means: Pretty good, not bad.

Te Aka gives the example sentence:

• He autaia tonu te kōhine rā ki te kōrero Māori. (The girl over there is pretty good at speaking Māori.)

This classifying sentence has the subject “te kōhine rā” (that girl over there).

This sentence uses the locative particle rā (over there) which is used to refer to locations which are not near the speaker or the listener. The other locative particles are nei (here, near the speaker) and nā (there, by the listener).

When you’re trying to specify that you’re talking about a specific instance of a noun, in a specific location, you can use “te/ngā [noun] nei/nā/rā” or you can combine these into a demonstrative determiner such as tēnei, tēnā or tērā, so you could have:

• te kurī nei (this dog)
• tēnei kurī (this dog)
• tērā tamaiti (that child)
• te tamaiti rā (that child)

You can choose which of these you want to use based on the rere (flow) of the sentence and what feels most natural to you.