These Are Not Helping You "Learn Hawaiian"
Aloha,
As my style of teaching has become more widespread, I get fewer questions about why I don't use the okina and kahako. Every once in a while someone will say something like, "Okina and kahako help me learn Hawaiian."
That is not 100% true. If you were to say that they help you identify a long vowel and a glottal stop, I could agree with that. But to say they help you learn Hawaiian, now I have an issue with that. Here is a short list that I will elaborate on.
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Even when people have the symbols, they still say words wrong
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Traditional text does not have the marks and learners find engaging with the material very difficult
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You cannot see these symbols when you listen to native speakers talk
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Modern writing does not accurately portray spoken Hawaiian
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People who learn with them tend to sound robotic and stiff and develop a strange accent and intonation
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They do not help you develop a Hawaiian worldview
I just put out a video about the word kakou, an extremely common word even for beginners. I have heard beginners, intermediate, and fluent speakers say it wrong, all of them writing it kākou. But the a is not where people struggle. It is the ou. Everyone forgets the u. No okina or kahako will help you with that.
The first time I sat in Hawaiian 401 at UH Manoa we were reading Hiiakaikapoliopele from the Hawaiian newspapers, where okina and kahako are not present. I read my part with ease and my classmates continued on. Then I watched in shock as the majority of students, who had been studying longer than me, struggled to read. I later found out it was because they had always had the marks in their lessons and now they were gone. They could not recognize the text our kupuna were accustomed to, so they had to unlearn some things.
In that same year we listened to recordings of native speakers from the 1970s. Again I was in shock as students struggled to understand what was being said. The pace, flow, intonation, and expressions were all different compared to the teachers, who were new speakers, that they had been learning from for several years. The okina and kahako were no help to them.
The word maikai is another common word, but most people don't know that many native speakers say meikai or mikai, and some say maikai. The same goes for laila, as in ma laila, a laila, and no laila. Many native speakers say leila or lila. No okina or kahako can teach you that.
Just a few months ago I met a former immersion student now working at an immersion school who told me she has a hard time understanding me because of my intonation and accent. The okina and kahako cause people to sound robotic and stiff because they become fixated on the markings to guide how they speak. For someone like me where spoken Hawaiian comes first and literacy follows, it is no wonder my new friend struggles to understand me the same way she struggles with native speakers.
The okina and kahako represent a glottal stop and a long vowel. That is it. What about a short or mid-length vowel? What about the ou in kakou? What about accent? What about worldview? Can the okina and kahako help you learn Hawaiian? They can show you where a long vowel and a glottal stop are. Sure. But that is the extent of it. They will not help you learn intonation, accent, worldview, nuances, or exceptions, and the list goes on.
If you want to speak fluently, lose the accent, and speak with the worldview of a native speaker, you have to do more than obsess over the okina and kahako when you read and write.
Anyways, that is my story and I am sticking to it.
Here are two videos worth watching on the topic:
Me ke aloha,
Maluhia
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