In regards to Shizune

[Caesius]

In an addition, it's not that I despise the person for it. It's just... well, if you see someone speaking french, how often do we go up to them and try to speak the few words we know to them?

Oui, oui! Bon, bon! Huhuhuh, poisson!

[vermithrx]

I replied this to another thread, but thought it would be applicable here for those not following other threads since it fits the theme of this thread well.

I am curious, but do you happen to know how long it usually takes to learn/master sign language at a level where conversation with a deaf individual is possible? I know it depends on commitment and the environment one grows up in, as well as the age (infants versus below 12 versus all other). However, I am thinking about whether those one session learn sign langauge courses is worth taking or not.

A hearing person would tell you "just a few months! I can totally talk to them now!"

A deaf person would open their eyes in horror and say don't even bother me until you have two years under your belt.

I can't count the number of times someone would hear that I'm deaf, and stop me while I am doing something, and say "I know sign language!" then proceed to fingerspell at me really. really. really. really. slowly. If looks could kill....

In an addition, it's not that I despise the person for it. It's just... well, if you see someone speaking french, how often do we go up to them and try to speak the few words we know to them?

But deaf people and sign language are just enough of a mythical beast that there are days were I would get stopped at least four times in a single mall trip. It gets old, fast. So I'm not trying to be mean spirited, but... well, it's just old. LOL.

Wow. This thread sure has changed a lot of my perceptions. I feel like an oaf for making the post that sparked this in retrospect, but I was more ignorant then and I hope you don't hold that against me. The task my family has placed before itself seems a lot more daunting now, but that is as it should be I suppose.

[stalk]

Wow. This thread sure has changed a lot of my perceptions. I feel like an oaf for making the post that sparked this in retrospect, but I was more ignorant then and I hope you don't hold that against me. The task my family has placed before itself seems a lot more daunting now, but that is as it should be I suppose.

Nope, I dont hold it against you. It's a perfectly understandable thing. To be frank, the best bet is to have just one or two people learn sign language. Trying to get an entire family to learn sign language is a lesson in futility and will only really serve to frustrate everyone. Most deaf children of hearing families I've seen (mine is inapplicable because, well, obviously you care about the kid that will be part of your family. My family didn't.) tend to have everyone kind of halfway signing. I.e. just learn some common key words.

For instance, when my friend's mom talks to him... She might speak "Would you go get the keys for me out of the car?" Now really, how much of this sentence is relevant? Not much, you can easily eliminate much of it. So what they do is they learn the sigh for key and car, both words you use often. So they will speak Will you please get the key (sign the key) from the car (sign car).

When it comes to lipreading I only have an approximately 50% understanding, and I lipread as good as the best lipreaders. It just doesn't get much better than 50%. So I will mentally filter out all the needless stuff and only catch the key words. However if I miss a key word the sentence can be confusing. So that's why signing the key words in addition to pronouncing it is good.

So instead of having a entire family take the class, have one or two people take the class. And teach the family a few key words, a little bit at a time. Just one word a week adds up and is easy to remember if you use it often enough. That will be more than enough.

[Cazzah]

Hope you don't mind the question bombardment stalk...

What are the most annoying questions or things people say to you as a deaf person or deaf people in general?

With your dog, how much of the training is shared with seeing eye dogs? Are they trained by the same organisation? Is the training subsidised/covered for you and how much does it cost you?

[stalk]

Hope you don't mind the question bombardment stalk...

What are the most annoying questions or things people say to you as a deaf person or deaf people in general?

With your dog, how much of the training is shared with seeing eye dogs? Are they trained by the same organisation? Is the training subsidised/covered for you and how much does it cost you?

Its early in the morning and I'm exhausted so I don't have the brain function to try to think about the first question. I will think about it and answer later today when I'm awake.

As for dog training, it's a complicated question. The absolutely biggest confusion in regards to service dogs is the organizations which train them. First of all, service dogs don't need to be trained by a organization. Second, there's no such thing as being a "certified service animal." There is no test where the dog has to pass something in order to become a service dog.

So yeah, it means basically anyone can just wake up one day, and regardless of the training (or lack thereof) the dog has, could just say it's a service dog. However these people are scum, and make life harder for the rest of us who are actually trying to compensate for a disability.

The similarities between a hearing dog and a seeing eye dog would first be that they are both heavily trained in basic obedience. And I mean really heavily. I.e. if I take Priscilla out to a store, and I stop to browse food. Someone could spill a can of the yummiest, tastiest treats in the world all around her and she wouldn't so much as blink. When I walk, she walks at heel (shoulders at my leg) and never breaks it. If I stop, she sits down immediately. If I browse, she lays down. Anytime an adult pets her, she sits down. Anytime a child approaches her, she lays down.

She does all this without me having to tell her anything. So when I say heavily trained... I really mean it. She was trained from being a puppy to an adult for 2 years. This aspect of the training is shared with seeing eye dog. Beyond training dog manners, there's socialization. Priscilla could practically be bitten in the face by another dog and would not react. When she sees other dogs she does not pull towards them. She gives a calm glance at them, then turns back at me. It doesnt matter how bouncy the other dog is, how close the other dog is to her, she will always keep her focus.

And by the way, none of this training involved the use of choke collars, prongs, electric collars, or any kind of punishment whatsoever. It was fully positive reinforcement training. And after those two similarities... there's task training. That's where the training of a hearing dog and a seeing eye dog strongly differ.

As for the price of it.. it depends. If you get it from an organization, usually the cost is mostly covered by donations. They say it costs about $15,000 to train a service dog. But since most of the training is done by volunteers, the cost is minimized. Most of the organizations that want to charge you money are scams. But a few might ask for about $1,000 or so.

A large part of the reason I self-trained Priscilla (with the help of the San Francisco SPCA) is because most organizations dont allow you to have more than one dog. Because a second dog would distract the first from their duties. I didn't particularly like that rule because I have a second dog.

[Caesius]

Reminds me of Para Para dancing:

[SnowSong]

I replied this to another thread, but thought it would be applicable here for those not following other threads since it fits the theme of this thread well.

A hearing person would tell you "just a few months! I can totally talk to them now!"

A deaf person would open their eyes in horror and say don't even bother me until you have two years under your belt.

I can't count the number of times someone would hear that I'm deaf, and stop me while I am doing something, and say "I know sign language!" then proceed to fingerspell at me really. really. really. really. slowly. If looks could kill....

In an addition, it's not that I despise the person for it. It's just... well, if you see someone speaking french, how often do we go up to them and try to speak the few words we know to them?

But deaf people and sign language are just enough of a mythical beast that there are days were I would get stopped at least four times in a single mall trip. It gets old, fast. So I'm not trying to be mean spirited, but... well, it's just old. LOL.

Wow. This thread sure has changed a lot of my perceptions. I feel like an oaf for making the post that sparked this in retrospect, but I was more ignorant then and I hope you don't hold that against me. The task my family has placed before itself seems a lot more daunting now, but that is as it should be I suppose.

Thanks for the info! I see it is a big task, and hopefully one day I will have the drive to see it through.

[stalk]

Reminds me of Para Para dancing:

Wow, surprisingly that actually is pretty close to my singing. I know he's not doing deaf singing, it's my first time seeing para para dancing, but how the hands are used are pretty close. Just not enough use of the rest of his body.

[Bara]

Reminds me of Para Para dancing:

Wow, surprisingly that actually is pretty close to my singing. I know he's not doing deaf singing, it's my first time seeing para para dancing, but how the hands are used are pretty close. Just not enough use of the rest of his body.

Wow! I didn't know the human elbow could spin like that. Owww! Just Owwww!
Yeah, from what little I know (and that is miniscule), Para Para dancing is almost the reverse of clogging. Clog dance uses almost 100% footwork, leaps and kicks while the upper body is almost rigidly motionless with the arms straight down the sides of the body. Para Para use arm motion and facial expression with minimal (generaly very simple side to side or front to back) steps.

[vermithrx]

Wow. This thread sure has changed a lot of my perceptions. I feel like an oaf for making the post that sparked this in retrospect, but I was more ignorant then and I hope you don't hold that against me. The task my family has placed before itself seems a lot more daunting now, but that is as it should be I suppose.

Nope, I dont hold it against you. It's a perfectly understandable thing. To be frank, the best bet is to have just one or two people learn sign language. Trying to get an entire family to learn sign language is a lesson in futility and will only really serve to frustrate everyone. Most deaf children of hearing families I've seen (mine is inapplicable because, well, obviously you care about the kid that will be part of your family. My family didn't.) tend to have everyone kind of halfway signing. I.e. just learn some common key words.

For instance, when my friend's mom talks to him... She might speak "Would you go get the keys for me out of the car?" Now really, how much of this sentence is relevant? Not much, you can easily eliminate much of it. So what they do is they learn the sigh for key and car, both words you use often. So they will speak Will you please get the key (sign the key) from the car (sign car).

When it comes to lipreading I only have an approximately 50% understanding, and I lipread as good as the best lipreaders. It just doesn't get much better than 50%. So I will mentally filter out all the needless stuff and only catch the key words. However if I miss a key word the sentence can be confusing. So that's why signing the key words in addition to pronouncing it is good.

So instead of having a entire family take the class, have one or two people take the class. And teach the family a few key words, a little bit at a time. Just one word a week adds up and is easy to remember if you use it often enough. That will be more than enough.

Thank you for the suggestion, I'll keep it in mind. It is going to be difficult regardless because the child in question is from an orphanage in Puerto Rico and, as far as I have been able to infer, only knows spoken Spanish. (She wasn't born deaf either.) I took four years of Spanish, but my speaking is pretty rusty. My aunt is fluent though, and I hear from her that the child is learning ASL pretty quickly.

So the other members of my family will need to become fluent in either ASL or Spanish (with ASL for key words like you mentioned) in order to communicate with her directly, since learning to lip read spoken English would be very difficult for her at this point. Realistically, I don't see either happening for most of us and that saddens me.

Haha...I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I obligated myself to be this little girl's male role-model for the purposes of the adoption. My aunt lives alone, you see. I may have to turn my entire life upside-down over the next couple of years, so this will be interesting.

[vermithrx]

I found these by accident, but they don't look very much like the Para Para dancing. More like ASL interpretations of English songs performed in time to them. I'm not sure if they're anywhere close, but they seemed interesting.



The guy who does these is very expressive.

[stalk]

I found these by accident, but they don't look very much like the Para Para dancing. More like ASL interpretations of English songs performed in time to them. I'm not sure if they're anywhere close, but they seemed interesting.



The guy who does these is very expressive.

Yeah, he basically translated into ASL. But it's not a expressive ASL song and by that I'm not talking about his body language and face, and so on. He is doing a lot better than most of the other sign language singing videos I've seen as well, who seem to be doing it in monotone. How expressive he is is not exceptional, by casual standards. If you ever watch a group of deaf people talking, first thing you will notice is how insanely expressive they are with body language and their faces.

However that doesn't translate well to video and most people try to sign way too strictly in videos. As such this is actually one of the better videos. I think my favorite one so far, not because it's good... Well, it is technically good- the way he follows the beat and the dance and mixes it with the signs is fantastic. But... I can't help but laugh at it.

[Caesius]

I found these by accident, but they don't look very much like the Para Para dancing. More like ASL interpretations of English songs performed in time to them. I'm not sure if they're anywhere close, but they seemed interesting.



The guy who does these is very expressive.

Those were really interesting. It's hard for me to understand how those signs accurately represent what's being signed, but most of the time I was watching his face instead of paying close attention to exactly what he was doing with his hands.

It probably takes some adjusting for a hearing person to look at someone's hands instead of their face when learning sign language.

[stalk]

I found these by accident, but they don't look very much like the Para Para dancing. More like ASL interpretations of English songs performed in time to them. I'm not sure if they're anywhere close, but they seemed interesting.



The guy who does these is very expressive.

Those were really interesting. It's hard for me to understand how those signs accurately represent what's being signed, but most of the time I was watching his face instead of paying close attention to exactly what he was doing with his hands.

It probably takes some adjusting for a hearing person to look at someone's hands instead of their face when learning sign language.

Actually I don't look at the hands at all. Most deaf people are VERY insistent on eye contact during talk. Hearing people have this annoying habit of talking without eye contact. This drives us (myself included) batty. But you do have to adjust to be able to see more than just the face, but it all becomes intuitive the more experience you get. But I am always looking at the face more than anything else.

[vermithrx]

I found these by accident, but they don't look very much like the Para Para dancing. More like ASL interpretations of English songs performed in time to them. I'm not sure if they're anywhere close, but they seemed interesting.



The guy who does these is very expressive.

Yeah, he basically translated into ASL. But it's not a expressive ASL song and by that I'm not talking about his body language and face, and so on. He is doing a lot better than most of the other sign language singing videos I've seen as well, who seem to be doing it in monotone. How expressive he is is not exceptional, by casual standards. If you ever watch a group of deaf people talking, first thing you will notice is how insanely expressive they are with body language and their faces.

However that doesn't translate well to video and most people try to sign way too strictly in videos. As such this is actually one of the better videos. I think my favorite one so far, not because it's good... Well, it is technically good- the way he follows the beat and the dance and mixes it with the signs is fantastic. But... I can't help but laugh at it.

I'm not sure I get your meaning, but you're correct that body language doesn't seem to translate to video well. Maybe I'd have to see it in person.

That video annoyed me at first, because the bass is is turned way up in the music, so I couldn't hear the voices well. They were muffled and distorted to my already poor ears, so I was spending too much energy trying to descifer them. Then I had a thought, put on some noise-cancelling headphones and turned up my speakers and subwoofer. Much different experience, even though I couldn't understand the signing.

Those were really interesting. It's hard for me to understand how those signs accurately represent what's being signed, but most of the time I was watching his face instead of paying close attention to exactly what he was doing with his hands.

It probably takes some adjusting for a hearing person to look at someone's hands instead of their face when learning sign language.

I didn't have a problem seeing his movements while looking at his face, but I have trained myself to have amazing periferal vision. I read while I walk, anywhere and everywhere, up and down stairs, through crowded streets and hallways. I love doing it and hate being jostled, so I learned.

I also noticed that it isn't an exact translation (not sure if such a thing would be practical, let alone possible), so much as an interpretation. In the first video I linked there is nothing too obvious in the English lyrics to indicate that the singer is a vampire; it is all subtly implied. Yet when the words "I take a lonely waitress home to drink," occur, the signer pokes his neck with two fingers and appears to mime drinking from a cup. That's quite a bit more obvious to my mind, but may be necessary to get the song's humor across.