As my hānai (adoptive) mother would always say when visitors came to our house, “Welcome, friends. E komo mai!” In the same way, I welcome you to ʻŌlelo Online, a great online Hawaiian language classroom. Happy to have you here!
My name is Kaliko Beamer-Trapp and I am an educator and second-language learner of Hawaiian. Aloha! I started my journey over 20 years ago and now work in the area of Hawaiian language revitalization in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. I speak Hawaiian daily (around 90% of my day) in the course of my work and home life. I love teaching Hawaiian and thinking about how to break it down into all its wonderful parts.
Now I hope to share this wonderful language with the rest of the world – including you! If you are a first-time learner of Hawaiian, then you will find much here of interest. All of the lessons in basic Hawaiian language are numbered lower than more advanced Hawaiian lessons, so you can easily find your level by using the numbers assigned to each book or video or grammar lesson, and so on.
The site is divided into several easy-to-navigate sections:
- Audio/Books: Book Audio, Text, and Vocabulary
- Homework: Homework and Practice Worksheets
- Videos: Video Lessons on Grammar and Hawaiian Thinking
- Lessons: Downloadable Grammar Lesson Sheets
- Topics Entertainment “Instant Immersion” Audio CD Texts
- Quizzes & Tests (mixed in with the items shown above)
All of these items are available from the navigation menu, above, from anywhere in the site.
Most of the content on the site is actually free; however, the videos and some of the audio files are for members only. Membership is relatively inexpensive and helps me to pay for the equipment, server, and cloud storage to keep the site up and running. I appreciate your support!
If you wish to learn more about your instructor, you may find some of these links useful:
- About Kaliko Beamer-Trapp and ʻŌlelo Online – long article.
- Press-kit one-line bio – short and simple.
- Photo Gallery (Kaliko) – see who your instructor is!
- Article about Kaliko in Keola Magazine, November 2011
Above: “Aloha au i ka pepeke!” (I love the pepeke Hawaiian phrase pattern) says kumu Kaliko while teaching at Hālau Nā Lei Hulu i ka Wēkiu in San Francisco, Summer 2010.
Kumu Kaliko recording a segment of a Hawaiian audio book in Pepeʻekeo, Hawaiʻi Island (from a feature article in Ke Ola Magazine, 2011).
Thank you for stopping by – mahalo! Please take some time to look around.
Kaliko