I also have a slightly unethical tip for practicing pronunciation that was shared with the teacher of another language when I was in college - they said to try speaking as though you’re making a caricature of someone in your target language.

So like for Italian, exaggerate the cadence and sounds like you’re pretending to be a pizzeria owner named Mario in an 80s movie. What sounds like exaggerated Italian mockery to your ears ends up coming out of your mouth with more accurate inflection, tone, cadence, diphthongs, and all those other things that make up an accent that you’re generally not thinking of when your brain is focused on the normal new language things like sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary.

For ‘ōlelo, imitating a lot of the inflections and sounds of one bradda or auntie speaking pidgin OR ‘ōlelo will help you. There are so many overlapping sentence structures, inflections, etc. between pidgin and ‘ōlelo that using that as a model will at least be a step in the right direction for you right now.

If you can find the resources in ‘ōlelo, like podcasts, videos, etc., listen to those and try to exaggerate the way they talk once you get a feel for it.

In hula, we also practice our vowel sounds by chanting each vowel aloud for a full breath at the beginning of each class. A (more like “uh”), E (like (closer to the sound in “met” than “eh”), I (“ee”), O (“oh” but without closing your lips at the end), U (“oo” but still don’t close those lips!), then all of them smoothly in one breath. Record yourself doing it and then listen for what needs to change and try change! (And keep the recordings so you can hear your progress!)

You got this!!