In-Depth Post #3

Hey everyone!

Since my last post I have met with my mentor, Tori, along with the four others in my group. This includes Sinu, Xylia and Anya. We decided to learn together to make it a less complicated schedule for Tori, making it more efficient to learn, and practising a language with others is the best way to learn it.

During the meeting we discussed what we intended to learn throughout the project to get a clearer view of the coming lessons, Tori answered some questions about deaf culture and other important points, we learned the basic greeting signs together, and we defined a meeting schedule that works for everyone.

We intend to learn the important signs that would help us get through in a conversation, allowing us to small talk in ASL, and although Tori can’t teach us all the signs because she is not completely fluent or certified, she is going to give us resources to learn from and act as someone we can practice with. Once we know some vocabulary, we can look more into grammar, since ASL has its own grammar and is not the same as English, so that will be helpful in being better at communicating in the language. Then, learning the deaf culture is an extremely important part of learning ASL because being respectful to the deaf community is necessary when speaking in the primarily used language in that group. I made sure to make it clear that this was something that I was really wanting to focus on at some point in our mentor-ship.

We started with Tori answering questions that a couple of us had come up with, which included a few different topics. The first one covered was, “How did your research on the culture and history of ASL change your perspective on the language? Did your developing understanding help or change nothing when learning ASL?”, which was asked by Anya. I have included parts of Tori’s answer that I thought were representative of her thoughts.

“Learning the background of this language has made me think twice about how I use it, making sure I’m respecting the language and making sure I’m using it in a way that’s not going to offend anyone. For example, a hearing person should never use ASL for a performance purpose because that’s kind of retracting from the language and the culture.” “…Making sure you’re using it in the right ways and for the right reasons.” I pulled interest from this because I really connected with that statement. Recently I have been thinking about how I can be respectful of the deaf community when learning and using ASL, as well as reflecting on why I want to learn the language. So I thought that this encapsulated those feelings in a very concise way and explains it well.

The second question was, “What can we expect to experience or what challenges will we face while trying to learn and understand ASL as a language and culturally?”, also asked by Anya. She mentioned that we should be careful when looking at articles from deaf people, because there are lots of opinion pieces and are not always fact for everyone and there are different opinions within the community, so we should be careful to not generalize those pieces. Something that also stood out to me was when she talked a little about one of her early struggles. “…One thing for me was for a while, when I was learning ASL I was kind of thinking of it as another way to express English… ASL is an entire language on its own and it has its own grammar…” She talked about how it’s not just another version of English and I enjoyed this answer because thinking about different languages in that way has really helped me in learning other ones as well, making it easier to think about translation.

Tori spoke about what would be considered rude or offensive in the deaf community, from my prompting in our previous meeting. This included not seeing being deaf or hard of hearing as a disability, like they’re missing something or have lost something, because it’s not a bad thing or a disability. This means that calling it hearing “loss” is not considered polite. “People in deaf culture very much take on their deafness as something that is part of them, something that shouldn’t be fixed, something that is just being a different culture.” I found this to be really powerful because it makes you think more about how being deaf is actually thought of from a deaf persons perspective, helping understand that community more. She also mentioned some rude/offensive phrases, saying and such to avoid like, “I’m so sorry for you”, “deaf as a doorknob”, “deaf and dumb/deaf and mute” (the last two are older sayings). Another thing is the “no never mind rule”, basically about how deaf or hard of hearing people will miss a lot of things you might say quieter or harder to notice, so you should never say “no never mind” and should repeat yourself, even if you rethink your statement, out of respect so they don’t feel like they’re being left out of something. I had to commit this to my memory, because I tend to mutter to myself and say never mind a lot, so I would have to work on this to be more polite.

We also learned how to greet someone and introduce ourselves with finger-spelling, along with “nice to meet you”, “what’s your name”, “how old are you”, how to sign your age, and how to ask and reply to “how are you”. We practice this by signing each other’s names and asking a question to that person in ASL, which they have to respond to. While learning these, a question came up as to what hand-shape should be used for sign the sign for “my”, and Tori answered saying that you use your palm on your chest and not your pointer finger, which is “I”. I supported this fact by saying it is the same as “you” vs “your”, using your index finger vs your palm, respectively. I knew this from previous learning of basic signs on a website, and I wanted to clarify and connect with that.

During our meeting, we decide that we would meet at 2 pm every second Sunday for probably an hour each, starting with vocabulary and progressing through our “curriculum”. We would try to dedicate a small amount of time once we had some basic knowledge to practising without speaking each meeting to build our comfort in using ASL. In between meetings, we use resources provided by Tori to learn some basic vocab from a list that we put together in a shared document. Because I already know a fair amount of ASL from previous learning experience, I knew that I was going to be adjusting the list that I personally needed to learn, making it more specific to me. Also, if, as the project progresses, we are not reaching the material that I hope to learn, and I find that much of what we are learning is knowledge I already have, I plan to possibly set up extra one-on-one meetings with Tori tailored to my progress, as well as attending the group meetings.

In conclusion, I found that the techniques from the “How To Have A Beautiful Mind” criteria I used mainly were:

#6 “To find and make connections that link matters together and generates interest.”

#10 “To explore, to elaborate and to pull interest out of the matter.”

#3 “To support a point your mentor makes with additional facts, figures, evidence etc.”

#10 “To modify an idea to make it more acceptable to yourself and to make it stronger or more practical.”

Thanks for reading!