As we approach the beginning of April, I feel like I am at a point in my language learning journey where for the first time, I can proudly say that I am able to comprehend and communicate in basic ASL. Just recently, my friends and I went to watch the new Godzilla vs Kong movie in theatres, I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see Kong communicating in sign language. There is a component of the movie that explores the relationship between Kong, a giant ape, and a little girl by the name of Jia who is deaf. For the most part, I was able to follow their conversations in ASL throughout the movie, needless to say my friends were quite impressed. This was a testament to how far I have come in my language learning journey and served as a good reminder as to why I took this course to begin with.
In today’s discussion post, I would like to delve deeper into the world of ASL and talk a little more about some of the fundamental differences between ASL and English that I have observed. Additionally, I would like to address some of the challenges I initially faced and how I was able to mitigate them.
One of the earlier challenges we had while beginning to learn ASL was to acknowledge the fact that ASL is very different from Signed Exact English (SEE). Contemporary ASL has its origins in French Sign Language (FSL) along with its own grammar, syntax, and idioms. SEE on the other hand is a manual system of communication that strives to be an exact representation of English vocabulary and grammar. Let’s say for example that we would like to ask our friend the question “Did you watch the game yesterday?” In SEE, you would simply make the signs for all the words in that particular order however, that is fundamentally different to how a native ASL speaker would communicate the same message. While English follows the subject-verb-object sentence structure, ASL uses the time-noun-adjective-verb structure also known as “TNAV.” ASL also eliminates the need for what they describe as “filler words” such as “did” or “the.” Thus, “Did you watch the game yesterday?” would translate in ASL signs to “Yesterday (time) game (noun) watch (verb) you?” I have gotten much better at recognizing these differences and my abilities as a translator have started to feel a little more natural. Previously, I would feel intimidated when asked to sign a specific sentence because my mind would immediately start racing to recall what the signage was for a particular word. In doing so, I would often start translating in SEE as opposed to transforming the sentence structure to be complicit with ASL customs. Another challenge we had was with becoming natural in incorporating facial expressions into our conversations. However, I noticed that once I started to become more confident with my vocabulary, I had more time to think and thus properly use facial expressions to accompany my signing. I felt very proud when Ms. Kaye remarked that I had improved significantly in this regard since the beginning of the semester.
Going forwards, we have a final cultural presentation coming up in which Susmita and I hope to discuss the history behind ASL as well as current controversies and challenges faced by the deaf community. I came across a statistic earlier in the semester that despite the passing of the Americans with Disability Act in 1990, members of the deaf community have three times the unemployment rate of hearing people. As a society, there is still a lot left to be desired in terms of an equitable distribution of resources and social justice especially for members of the deaf community. I wish to continue learning more about deaf culture and their struggles in the hopes that one day in the future I might be able to play a small part in furthering the Deaf agenda and narrative.
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