stalk wrote:First being that Misha is sitting next to Shizune. That's a excellent way to add neck conditions to Shizune's list of disabilities.
One other thing that you may find interesting, which I do not know if it's touched upon later (I've just gotten past the part where I met the school nurse) however deaf mutes have the most impressively horrid written English in existence. Due to their having never spoken english, so typically during stages where they learn to communicate they learn sign language called "American Sign Language" (Japan has their own equivalent which follows a similar grammar rule structure) where a lot of words are omitted. A typical example that's commonly given is the sentence "The car was speeding along the highway while being chased by the police went up the bridge and flew over it at high speeds, crashing into the street below and swerving back and forth before resuming the chase" would require only two signs from an fluent ASL signer.
As such their English grammar, by the time they start writing, is lacking significantly and tend to omit words. A example of what a deaf mute might write, if attempting to convey the earlier sentence, would be "car speed while chase jumped bridge with police behind". It makes sense from an ASL standpoint but clearly not proper english. How this could be taken advantage of as a moe moe thing later in the game is up to the writers. Perhaps some kind of embarassment added to her somewhat tsun tsun side where she wants help with her english (japanese?)?
Note: I became deaf at the age of 4, and am not mute.... as well as the fact I went to an oral school until I was 8 before learning sign language and joining a school for the deaf. So, my english is significantly better than most- for reference I had to take several classes at the local high school because education at the deaf schools significantly lack in comparision to public schools. My understanding is that Japan is even worse so, but you know how these rumors are.
About the first thing, I would believe that Misha's sitting position comes from the fact that she's a student herself. Although it would make sense for her to be sitting at a 90º angle and in front of Shizune, or for both of them to be sitting 45º toward each other, so neither has to do much neck movement to see each other or the blackboard.
If Japanese Sign Language is based upon ASL, then we would need to learn just how closely related are the two sign languages. If they happened to be close enough, then learning Japanese and JSL would count as having two different languages.
I would know:
[*] I'm not a native English speaker. I was raised with Spanish as my first language, yet could never learn English even after years of afternoon courses. I only learned English after learning written Ancient Greek and Latin. Think is, I didn't really learn how to speak English: nowadays, while I edit literary works in English, written by native English speakers, I know these very people who come to me to correct their writing wouldn't believe its the same person speaking.
[*] After learning English, and once I knew better English grammar and vocabulary than I ever did in Spanish, I noticed that now I was thinking in English and translating into Spanish before I spoke. Trying to reconcile, I created a conceptual language which I called Babel 19 (named after the book "Babel 17" by Samuel R. Delany), which was supposed to help me organize my thoughts. It helped,to a degree: nowadays I think in English when I write, think in Spanish when I speak, not use any language when I think and don't really notice the input language when I receive input.
[*] People can learn different levels within a single language: street talk, politicalese, medicalese, technicalese, media slang, etcetera. Is just like body language: you can be a meek and shy debutante one second, then blink and shift to assassin/bodyguard and do a patrol of the back alley behind your hotel. Just like I can slip inside a hospital or get a free 5-Star meal just by mixing in with the media and waving my cellphone like a camera, I can slip through traffic violations by treating the traffic cop like I'm an equal and thus off-limits.
(Police corruption still runs rampant in México).
With all this, what I meant to say is that if Shizune made council president she would first need to be an exceptional student. Perhaps conciously, perhaps not, but she might handle Japanese as a separate language than JSL.
Perhaps
you too handle ASL as a separate language than English. After all, you handle two separate grammars and vocabularies (one sound-based vocabulary, one gesture-based vocabulary), and your speech about ASL grammar sounds like me trying to explain the Mexican concept of Death to an American.
Anyway just my thoughts on the game so far. I'm not offended by the content of the games, however I can easily see some kind of community outrage at the game if it ever became well known. I found the game rather interesting from the perspective of someone who went from grades 5 to 12 living on campus at probably the closest thing to a school like in the game, a deaf school with a school for the blind on campus, and several classes for disabled kids. However they were all kept separate rather than all put in the same class like in this game.
Well, the game does have the blind kids on their own class. And the lesson seems to be deaf-accessible by having a teacher that barely speaks to begin with.
And now that I think about it, why hasn't Hanako learned Braille and transferred to Lilly's classroom?
Obviously it wouldn't have happened in the past, game-wise, as we wouldn't have met Lilly or Hanako; however, it could be a nice detail for the second or third story arc...
I might need to write a fanfiction about that. Don't know, second or third week into the path of these two girls and we find the two girls on the library helping each other through an assignment and passing around a Braille book.
