Deaf Sounds

Juan Pablo Bonet, one of sign language's daddies

Grammar? ‘the hell is this stuff? Did you know that American Sign Language has an entirely different grammatical structure? It’s nothing like spoken English at all. I’ve a hard enough time stringing a coherent, grammatically correct sentence together in English, let alone doing that in a language with a totally different bone structure.

 As my struggle to learn this new language continues, I think of my mother’s childhood language battles. Her parents were Italian immigrants — they lived in an all-Italian neighborhood in New Haven. She heard English for the first time when she started elementary school. Tiny Lucia learned by watching other children. When a classmate would say they were going to the water fountain, she came to understand that water equaled agua.

Immersion learning is scary and, for us late-deafened folk (my hearing took the last train for the coast when I was in my late 40s), not often possible, but it does seem most effective.

 In advance of losing my hearing completely, but not too much in advance — I’m a procrastination queen after all — I enrolled in a couple of ASL classes at the local adult ed. center. Unfortunately, both classes were geared toward people with hearing, and, by that time,  my hearing had degraded to the point where I couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying.
Relying on lip-reading to make sense of the sounds I heard, I was mostly fine one-on-one but not in groups — too confusing.

The instructor’s lecture and class discussion were incomprehensible. I also felt intimidated by all these young, vibrantly healthy, hearing individuals who were taking the class because they thought ASL was cool. Fun for them — survival for me.

After this The Amazing Bob, Jen, Oni and my sister and I hired a tutor who came into our home to work with us all. The small group, that it was my family and we were in our living room, made everything less daunting and intimidating. Plus, the instructor was deaf and showed vs. told. This made an enormous difference in my ability to understand.

Currently mia famiglia and I communicate using a combination of strategies — ASL, signed English, written notes and lip-reading. Our mélange method works for us. I suppose we’ve created our own cobbled-together sort of language.

Given this it’s no surprise that I’ve a hell of a time keeping up when I have professional interpreters for my med visits. Even though the ‘terps understand that they need to sign slowly for me, they’re using straight-up ASL. That’s très splendid for fluent types but that ain’t me, babes. I get the essence of what’s being communicated but miss the details.

 At Mass General (AKA my home away from home) now, the docs can set up a CART type of deal — as they speak their words appear on their computer screen. It’s a buggy system and doesn’t always work but when it does it’s double plus awesome.

I’m motivated to learn more ASL and leave this in between place with language. I’m not able to fully comprehend any spoken or signed language and not too many folks speak my family’s secret language.

Yet.