Topics Instant Immersion Hawaiian CD Help

Here are the help files for the Topics Entertainment “Instant Immersion Hawaiian” audio discs I made many years ago.

When I was approached by Topics Entertainment sometime in late 2002 to create a Hawaiian “Instant Immersion” series of audio discs, I asked them to please let me include a booklet, thinking that, of course, it would be most helpful to have accompanying text to help listeners understand what was going on.

Topics said firmly, “No way. Are you kidding? This is ‘Instant Immersion’. No text!” and that was the end of that.

So I asked if I could make a simplified guide book to bundle with the series. Again, “No way.” Their feeling was that listeners would learn as children do: by listening and repeating. Well, I have my thoughts on that when it comes to adult learners, but let’s leave that topic for another day.

I went ahead anyway and published the texts myself as PDF documents on my old website, PanPolynesia.net. After that site went down around 2009, so did the files, and it was several years before listeners had access to them. I actually lost the PDFs I had originally created, and it wasn’t until sometime in 2015 that I found the 2007 revised versions on an old unused hard drive.

From 2015 to 2020, the PDF files were available here. But at the start of 2021, my lovely wahine, Leiloke, and I reworked the whole lot —all 230 segments of it!— into the searchable webpages that you see here today!

Oh, one more thing: I was fortunate enough to have won the 2005 national Audie Awards “Judges Choice Award” in the Language Learning category for this set of audio lessons (coming in ahead of both Pimsleur French Level One and Berlitz Basic French). I am so glad I wrote my own material for these CDs and didn’t follow the tourist-style template that the other Instant Immersion discs all used at the time!

Enjoy!
me ke aloha, Kumu Kaliko

Instant Immersion Hawaiian CD Help

Disc One

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Pronunciation of the Alphabet
• 3. Basic Articles (“A”, “An”, “Some”, and “The”)
• 4. The “Hakalama” Sound Set
• 5. Greetings for Beginners

Disc Two: Hawaiʻi Island

• 1. Hawaiʻi Island Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. Describing Things
• 4. The Future Tense

Disc Three: Maui Island

• 1. Maui Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. Sentence Subject Using Common Nouns
• 4. Introducing the Plural Article “Nā” (“The” for several things)
• 5. Sentence Subject Using Proper Nouns
• 6. The Past Tense
• 7. Because

Disc Four: Oʻahu Island

• 1. Oʻahu Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. First-Person Pronoun “I” & Times of Day
• 4. Numbers & More Number Practice
• 5. Second-person Pronoun “You”
• 6. Using “i” for Destination

Disc Five: Kauaʻi Island

• 1. Kauaʻi Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. How To Say Where Something Is From
• 4. Using “kekahi” and “kekahi mau”
• 5. Direct Object Marker “iā”
• 6. In Front, Behind

Disc Six: Molokaʻi Island

• 1. Molokaʻi Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. How To Say Something Is Somewhere
• 4. On Top and Underneath, “i luna” and “i lalo”
• 5. Showing Time Using “mua” and “hope”

Disc Seven: Lānaʻi Island

• 1. Lānaʻi Story
• 2. Vocabulary
• 3. Parts Of The Body
• 4. How to Say “Should” in Hawaiian Using “E”
• 5. Colors in Hawaiian
• 6. Days and Months

Disc Eight

• 1. Review of Expressions
• 2. Moving Parts Of A Sentence Around
• 3. Yes/No Question Intonation in Hawaiian
• 4. Quiz For Hawaiʻi (Disc 2)
• 5. Quiz For Maui (Disc 3)
• 6. Quiz For Oʻahu (Disc 4)
• 7. Quiz For Kauaʻi (Disc 5)
• 8. Quiz For Molokaʻi (Disc 6)
• 9. Quiz For Lānaʻi (Disc 7)