You Want to Learn Hawaiian
You have the desire and means - what you're missing is an outline or plan to follow.
The Backbone of the Full Courses
As a Hawaiian language student, teacher, and linguist, I have found that prioritizing expressions (sentence structures), is critical to becoming conversational in Hawaiian.
In many beginner books and courses vocabulary is over-emphasized. While vocabulary is important, it is not the key to becoming conversational. My textbooks and courses are built on the basis of Hawaiian expressions.
This may be different from what you've experienced before in other classes, but consider your first language - You become fluent, but do you know every word in existence? Does it keep you from speaking??
No!
Another pro for focusing on sentence structures over vocabulary is that there are fewer sentence structures to memorize.
For all these reasons, my textbooks are the perfect guides to lead you through learning Hawaiian. I even used these textbooks as the foundation of my two full online courses.
Explore the Textbooks
Student Testimonials
Keolahou
"When I was reading your book I realized that olelo Hawaii is more than just a language, it’s an alive mechanism that involves culture, tradition, past, now, and future. It was like a wake up call."
Shannon
"Though I can only attest to utilizing Mahele 1 in a self guided manner, the order and format provide immediate and useful application which has vastly expanded my knowledge and understanding. I would imagine that taking the actual course and engaging in more tutoring would place me even further on."
Mahele 1 Texbook PDF:
If you are a beginner, this is the book to start with. I selected expressions and vocabulary that every new learner should have. This book has 25 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a sentence structure, followed by vocabulary and dialogues to support the main sentence structure.
As you go at your own pace through the book, you will be able to practice writing the structures and words. This will help you solidify what you are learning. I don't recommend going through the book without this step.
It helps if you make them your own. As you complete each chapter and get to the practice portions - I encourage you to write sentences you hear or say yourself. Making your learning personal to you will help you memorize the content quickly.
Intermediate Level
Mahele 2 Textbook PDF
This book is for an intermediate-level student. Once you have a basic foundation in Hawaiian you can start building for a conversational level.
Conversational speech requires combining multiple thoughts, understanding traditional written Hawaiian, and replacing English thought with Hawaiian. This book will help you begin the process.
This book has 29 chapters dedicated to building on what you know. Each chapter builds on a sentence structure and contains tables and dialogues to support it.
A fun exercise I recommend as you go through the course is to read the dialogues out loud to practice. Another exercise you can do is to create your dialog patterning your own after the one provided.
Consider This!
While these textbooks will give you a great foundation for understanding the language, the biggest drawback with learning from any language textbook is the absence of voice. At some point, in order to obtain fluent speech, you'll have to listen to how words and expressions are spoken.
My 2 full courses provide you with the textbook along with videos and recordings that will take you through each chapter.
Need more time to think about it? Check out what the full courses have to offer...
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