Current Status
Not Enrolled
Price
$225.00
Get Started
or

What This Course Teaches:

  • Fundamentals: the basic rules of pronunciation including vowel sounds, diphthongs, and diacritical marks
  • Follow the model: common Hawaiian words and placenames are modeled for you in perfect pronunciation so you know what they sound like.
  • Record and practice : This course uniquely walks you through the words and lets you listen to yourself compared to the model : no other courses that we researched have this feature!
  • Targeted purpose : unlike other Hawaiian language courses which attempt to teach conversational Hawaiian : this course solely focuses on correct pronunciation of Hawaiian words, making it far, far easier and quicker to learn while providing immediate practical benefits you’ll use every day in Hawaii.

Why You Need to Learn This

The way you can instantly tell if someone is from the mainland is when they start talking and have to pronounce a Hawaiian word, usually a street or place name.  Nearly all streets in Hawaii are Hawaiian words so there’s really no getting around it – you’ll have to say a Hawaiian word in nearly every conversation. If you pronounce Hawaiian words like foreigners (haoles) do, you’ll instantly reveal that not only are you not from here, but you also don’t care enough about the local culture to make the effort to learn the language.

You don’t need to know how to speak Hawaiian, meaning that you can carry on a conversation in Hawaiian – but you most certainly need to know how to correctly pronounce Hawaiian words IF you want to demonstrate your local creds.

There are a lot of courses online about speaking Hawaiian.  But there weren’t any that we could find (or we would use them!) that were specifically designed to teach mainland transplants how to pronounce Hawaiian words.  This course is a collection of lessons I was taught by native Hawaiians over the course of my lifetime in Hawaii starting in 1984 at age 21.