I feel like being a Native Hawaiian in college is such a different experience than other experiences. It is not that the experience is bad but it is just a situation that is hard to find comfort in when you have passions in multiple things that may not always find a common ground. Unless of course you are not a Hawaiian Studies major or Hawaiian language. So far in my experience I am the only person I know who is looking to double major in ICS and Hawaiian Language.
In essence I am in school learning different languages. I grew up bilingual on the Island of Hawaiʻi, being raised in a little plantation town gave me the opportunity to learning and speaking standard english in school and speaking Hawaiian Creole English. Then reaching highschool and going to a boarding and day school known as Kamehameha Schools at Kapālama, I started my journey in Hawaiian Language where I took two years of Hawaiian(when I thought I learned enough and did not need to continue for some reason). When my senior year came around I found out there was a course being offered, AP computer science. It was a course that I got an A in but I can say with confidence I did not learn much because the teacher did not teach us anything. We were told that the class was heavily a self directed course but the majority of us did not know jack squat about java or coding in general. Learning my fourth “code” started at the same time I started college. Learning Java then C and C++ while in college has really oppened my mind and made me think more literally in my everyday life. I feel like it just turns into a mindset to be able to code and if you do not think in code, then you have to change your mindset while doing work and make your life even worse because of the extra work you put on your brain. If you have a mindset that processes things in code then what better for a student who is looking to be in the Computer Science field.
The hard part is that when learning Hawaiian, manny people have a background in english as their first language. This is not a good thing at all because the grammar structures for the two languages are not the same in any case. In the english language the opperate on the SVO structure while in Hawaiian they opperate in the VSO structure. Basically you have the switch your thinking when you translate and you cannot translate literally. When learning this the biggest thing that helped me was previously knowing Hawaiian Creole English, commonly refered as “pigin”(Which is actually what HCE is derived from). HCE helped me because some parts of speaking came from some Native Hawaiian sentance structures. So I had to change my thinking and translating in my head but eventually the light bulb turned on and all of a sudden I fell in love with the Hawaiian Language. The harder part of learning Hawaiian comes in when you look at older pieces of text and language and you don’t understand a thing they are saying because it seems like giberish to you. This can be because of the poetic thinking that Native Hawaiians had in the day, referring to your loved one as a type of flower that is bery beutiful may be pretty obvious but then you read a verse in a song about going to the ocean and picking limu(sea weed) and your kumu(teacher) hints at different meanings your mind really opens up and you start to think about a whole different perspective that you are gonna need to think in to understand what they truly meant when they composed their words.
So in my head I have an epic fight of mass proportions arguing over what and how to think. “E manaʻo ma ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi no ka mea pono iā ʻoe ke hoʻomau i ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.” “if(thinking) return logic;” It is my hope that one day my mind achieves equilibrium and is able to dip into both ways of thinking. Computer Science is so rigid and strict about how to do things. Hawaiian Language is poetic and things have different meanings to different levels of thinkers. Just to be able to learn and practice what I love and want to do for the rest of my life means a lot to me, it will mean even more to me when both are incorperated into one culminating thing. Ke ʻano o ia mea? ʻAʻole au ʻike akā ʻo kaʻu pahuhopu ʻo kekahi mea o ka hoʻomanaʻo nui o ka lehulehu.