11-07-2011, 09:56 PM
quote:It's not a good thing if you speak it awkwardly. I don't try either, maybe a word here and there.
Whenever I've witnessed non-locals (of any ethnicity) try to speak pidgin, it always seems like a caricature, not a respectful discussion.
My husband always speaks pidgin to anyone who speaks it. After putting in a few years on survey crews and other jobs where it was spoken all the time, he learned.
My younger son has been here about eight years working on painting crews with local guys, and he speaks pidgin with the guys just fine. Also my DIL moved to Maui when she was in her teens and had a local boyfriend, so she was fluent and spoke it around the house a lot. So no, it isn't considered disrespectful if you can pull it off; it will help break down the barriers.
If you stumble over it and get it wrong, you sound stupid, like a haole trying to be something he's not. (like I would).
My husband has the laugh down exactly; you couldn't tell he's not local if you heard him without seeing him. Some people are just good at picking up dialect. He was the same when he worked in Japan, got the sound of Japanese down very fast, even though he couldn't speak that much of it.
The place names aren't difficult, only unfamiliar when we arrive. My grandson was born here, and you say any place name or Hawaiian word to him and he says it right back and never stumbles on the syllables. He has a harder time with difficult English words.
One thing about learning street names -- you will find that local pronunciation may not be the same as proper Hawaiian language pronunciation. Most locals do not speak Hawaiian, but they all know place names, naturally. They pronounce it the way people do in the locality, not by formal rules. So be prepared to have people correct you with some words if you are too correct in your pronunciation -- and look at you funny too. [:p]
Then you try it the local way and happen to run into a purist -- and they correct you.
So don't worry about it, you can't please everyone.