"you and I"

Translation: kāua

[GeraldMath4]

"you" could be more than one person. If I were a kumu I might say to my class "Hello to you." In that case kākou would refer to 23 people, the speaker, a bunch of listeners and no "others."

[kgoodridge1]

Thank you. This really explained it, and I learned another new word: kumu = teacher!

[kgoodridge1]

Kākou and kāua seem to be interchangeable. Are they?

[jdmcowan]

Kāua refers to two people, the speaker and the listener. Kākou refers to 3 or more people, the speaker, the listener, and others. In English we use "we" for both of these situations, but in Hawaiian, you can specifically exclude or include others besides the speaker and listener by using these two words. Because kākou includes others, it is sometimes translated as "all of us" or "everyone".

Notice, also, that sometimes when we say "we" in English, we might instead mean "me and others", but not including the listener. There are separate words for that as well, but they are not currently included in the short initial release of this course. Hopefully they will be in a soon upcoming expansion.

[kgoodridge1]

Thanks, that helped! I do hope they expand on the course soon.

[Tom692084]

If keyboard or display doesn't offer kahakou it cannot be entered. Please display link to it whenever we must write.

[jdmcowan]

This is a user forum and I'm not sure what you expect the other users to do about it. Perhaps the Trouble Shooting forum would be a better place to ask for help: https://forum.duolingo.com/topic/647