Aloha ka kou!

I am lucky enough to have found a wonderful Hawai'ian language teacher, Chivas, to tutor me in the Hawai'ian language over the next four weeks or so, as I am resident in Honolulu teaching at the University of Hawaii's summer interpreting institute. She's so creative and so patient with my strange requests about *exactly* how I want to be taught (TPRS, of course!)

So for anyone out there who has a strange desire to learn Hawai'ian language in a most unorthodox way, here are the (wildly repetitive) Hawai'ian stories we are spinning in my linguistic adventures. Don't know how far we'll get over the next couple of weeks, but we'll see.

Each post is a story, usually beginning with the four new vocabulary words for the day. I knew a few words of Hawai'ian before I started (the usual things like "aloha" and "mahalo" for "thank you", that you hear all over the islands) and also I can pick up quite a few "extra" words in the course of the story, since it's easy for us to indicate things like "big" or "small" without expressly teaching the word.

For more information on the TPRS method of language teaching, you can join the "moreTPRS" list at yahoogroups, where you will find over 1,000 teachers using this wonderful method of language acquisition.