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Ways to maintain a language?


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I have a syatem for maintaining my French. Now I have a new problem. My husband and I are working on American Sign Language together. (No children involved.) The idea is to learn now, when we are comparitively young, so we can use it later, when we are old and deaf. For this to work, we need to use it together regularly. English will remain our main family language. People here have had various strategies for using two languages as a family. Can you review them for me? Obviously, OPOL won,t work for our purposes. : )

 

Nan

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Arcadia - Doubling up would be a good idea except that I can see already that ASL grammar would work much better for ASL than English grammar, and I don,t even know much of it yet. I don,t think I,ll be able to double up until I am better at it. Short stuff would work.

 

Rosie - Already we can see where this is going to be nice for noisy situations.

 

Matroyshka - I know. I keep thinking of things that won,t work, too lol.

 

Lolo - How do I make deaf friends? I agree that this would be an easy way, but I,m not sure how to go about it.

 

Nan

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Arcadia - Doubling up would be a good idea except that I can see already that ASL grammar would work much better for ASL than English grammar, and I don,t even know much of it yet. I don,t think I,ll be able to double up until I am better at it. Short stuff would work.

 

You won't ever be able to speak-sign with proper ASL grammar. It's not possible. :) Speaking signing with questionable grammar is a useful method of communication anyway though.

 

I don't know where you find Deaf friends who want to teach you. Most really, really don't. If you are churchy and can find a church with a Deaf population, that's an in.

 

 

Do you catch much public transport? That's a good place for signing practice. We used to finger spell all the train stations and when we got faster, try to keep up with all the announcements on the electronic sign.

Edited by Rosie_0801
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Check and see if your area has a Deaf social group. If your area does not have that look at the registry of interprters and ask for help meeting the Deaf population. Also churches are great places to see if there is a Deaf ministry. It has been 17 years since I was a beginner (wow I feel old saying that!) but I have yet to meet anyone who wasnt willing to have a hearing person join in to learn and talk! Most Deaf people do want to be able to talk fast but are willing to go slow and repeat. Also, videos or youtube are great places to practice receptive skills.

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The problem that we have found in continuing to use Mandarin is that it becomes a 'family language', used with incorrect grammar as a kind of shorthand.  Useful if you want to talk privately in a crowd of strangers (although not infallible!) but you get into bad habits.

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The problem that we have found in continuing to use Mandarin is that it becomes a 'family language', used with incorrect grammar as a kind of shorthand.  Useful if you want to talk privately in a crowd of strangers (although not infallible!) but you get into bad habits.

 

Less of a problem with a signed language, since apart from a few made up signs, laziness will shift grammar to English and unless you're signing with a Deaf person with utterly atrocious English, they'll still understand.

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The problem that we have found in continuing to use Mandarin is that it becomes a 'family language', used with incorrect grammar as a kind of shorthand. Useful if you want to talk privately in a crowd of strangers (although not infallible!) but you get into bad habits.

Well, ultimately a family language would be just fine, but I don,t really want to evolve into that this soon. I think we need a better base first. ASL works as a language. Years of polishing and improving by many people probably is going to do a better job at developing something efficient and comprehensive and I don,t know if what we evolved would work as well. I have no idea. Also, We are sieve brained and we wouldn,t remember what we had come up. I,d probably have to make a dictionary. I,d rather use someone else,s.

 

Rosie, ditto for the grammar side of things. We don,t need to use proper grammar, but I,d like to try to begin that way, at least. We actually tend to use fairly lengthy and formal English with each other at home. We routinely say things like: "I am going to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Would you like me to make you one, too?" I am quite sure that we would be unwilling to say all those words in sign, though, or I would have picked some sort of signed English for us to learn rather than ASL. We are much too lazy. "PBJ I make you want too" (or however ASL would do it) seems way more manageable. We know each other well. As long as we can see each other, we can wordlessly convey the bit that implies I love you and am thinking about you and want to help you. We juggle our English word order to emphasize the bit we want emphasized and I can see that ASL has already worked out how to allow us to do that easily. Conveying caringness and juggling the emphasis are the two things I miss most when speaking something other than English.

 

Nan

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One family I know practices the second language at lunch. No English is to be spoken at the table for one meal a day.

I thought of this, but I think we are going to have trouble combining signing with eating at first.

 

If this were Spanish, We could practise whenever we are in the car together, which happens frequently, but that would be even harder than eating lol.

 

Nan

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I thought of this, but I think we are going to have trouble combining signing with eating at first.

 

If this were Spanish, We could practise whenever we are in the car together, which happens frequently, but that would be even harder than eating lol.

 

Nan

 

Yes, but with ASL you would be able to talk even when your mouth is full.  ;)

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Start with key word signing, so you can sign-speak, while you learn classifiers.

So double up as we speak but just the key words? That would help us to get the vocab we are are going to need down, anyway, and keep us from forgetting. We are going to need lots of weather words and not many food words lol.

 

Nan

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So double up as we speak but just the key words? That would help us to get the vocab we are are going to need down, anyway, and keep us from forgetting. We are going to need lots of weather words and not many food words lol.

 

Nan

 

Yes, that's a good first step in your situation, kind of like taking gesturing to a new level. Not what I'd recommend if you were studying for an exam, but that's not what you are doing.

 

Once you've built up a comfortable base of key word signs, you'll want to incorporate classifiers.

 

When the kids were little, did you ever play any of those games where you had to describe the location of items in a picture to another person to draw? You'll want to learn to do that in ASL too. Where things are matters. There are things you can't even talk about if you don't know what they look like.

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Hmmm... I,d hate to have to do that without pencil and paper. Maybe ASL is related to drawing? Did you make the ground be someplace first?

 

Nan

 

Yes. Well, the ground is usually kind of underneath boob level. Normal signing space. Classifiers are good. Classifiers are great. You can't talk about that sort of stuff with actual vocabulary items.

 

Anyway. I can't demonstrate from here. :lol:

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Yes. Well, the ground is usually kind of underneath boob level. Normal signing space. Classifiers are good. Classifiers are great. You can't talk about that sort of stuff with actual vocabulary items.

 

Anyway. I can't demonstrate from here. :lol:

 

Well, considering that you are pretty close to exactly under my feet and you'd have to flip everything for me to understand it, I guess I can see why you can't. : )  But I think I understand anyway.  Relating ASL to drawing wasn't something I had done before but it opens up a whole world of ideas about the possibilities of visual languages.  I will be careful that we pay proper attention to classifiers.  Thank you.  Do you have any more tips?

 

Nan

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Can you run video in your head? 

 

Some people think in written words, some in pictures, some in sound. It's good practice if you can picture video in your head (sound not necessary, lol.) It shows you where everything is and how people are moving in relation to everything else.

 

And transposition. When you get the hang of transposition, you'll be able to read the street directory better! Transposition is flipping what someone is signing because their left is your right. People sign directions and locations from their own pov. The burden is on the watcher to reverse it in their own head.

Edited by Rosie_0801
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Well I certainly don,t think in written words. That never occurred to me. I probably think in a mix of pictures and sound. I can do videos. They are pretty crude, but they are there if I want them. Guess I better work on that.

 

Anything to do with left and right has always been ify. I,m usually right about which is which. My husband says "your other left" pretty regularly and I have to tell anyone who gets in the car with me that they need to point to where I am supposed to go. I,ve had to work at reversing the sign videos. Everything physical like that that I,ve ever done was mirrored for learning. I couldn,t figure out why they didn,t do itin our lessons, too. I guess transposition is another thing I am going to have to work on.

 

Anything else?

 

Nan

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Anything else?

 

That'll do for now. :D

 

 

Nah, for anything more you'd need to ask an actual user of ASL. Grammar is pretty standard across signed languages but they probably have differences in minor features or different names for them. It doesn't matter if you have a hearing accent anyway.

 

Miming skills are useful too. Charades, but no "sounds like" ;)

Edited by Rosie_0801
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