stalk wrote:
Yeah for instance, I have a fair amount of skill in British Sign Langauge, Africian Sign Language... however when I sign it, I must first think it then translate it. My brain thinks in english, and I speak and write english naturally. I also sign ASL naturally without thought. It's actually difficult for me to translate, because even though I can speak english, and I can sign ASL, the two are completely separate.. if someone asks me to say "soandso" to someone, I have to consciously translate it to ASL. Well not quite, but it's not fluid.
I'm not a deaf person, but I am a linguistics major, so I think I can address the "deaf people learning to write" thing (
Warning: Long Explanation). For one, signed languages are actual
language, not just some series of obvious hand signals. They have their own morphology, syntax, grammar, and even a visual equivalent of phonology. People can acquire it naturally, and if a bunch of deaf children are left to their own devices they usually end up inventing a new sign language,
like these Nicaraguan kids.
The big, big difference between you and people who are deaf from birth is that your native language is English, while theirs is ASL. You had enough time to learn a large amount of English grammar, phonetics, etc, and that persisted even when you went deaf. It's the reason why you could go to an oral school, because you still retained knowledge of how certain sounds were made and how they look when spoken. When you learned to sign, at 8, you were near the tail end of what is called the "critical period" of language learning, which ends somewhere at around 10-12. After that, you can't acquire a language natively like you did with English.
When deaf kids want to learn English, they have to be old enough to learn to read, since learning it orally when you can't hear is extraordinarily hard and backfires most of the time. However, knowing ASL actually helps them to learn English, even though you may not think it would. If you try to teach them English after not allowing them to learn ASL, you'd be trying to teach an oral language to a deaf kid who hasn't spoken/signed any other language in the world. ASL allows them to ground the linguistic knowledge we all come packaged with, like what grammars are allowed in human language and how to parse things. Without that, things get messy.
However, people tend to make a stupid mistake when they teach deaf children English: they put it off until they get older, reasoning they need to be smarter to understand grammar and such. That means that bunches of them aren't learning English until past the critical period, so they have trouble acquiring it, and this gets worse since they have to read it. The definition of a language--any language-- isn't speech or signing, it's what a native speaker knows as virtue of being a native speaker; speaking/signing is once removed from this; writing is
twice removed. So, basically, deaf children have to learn an abstracted version of what English actually is, which is hard right off the bat.
In the case of ASL and English, the former is actually closer to Japanese syntactically and mostly uses an one of the rarest word orders among the words languages: Object-Agent-Verb. As you can imagine, this makes it much harder to learn English if your basis is ASL than if you're a native speaker of, say, German (besides the obvious phonetic issues).
JSL, on the other hand, while still a separate language, uses fairly similar syntax to Japanese. More of an issue for deaf Japanese people is that it's only been about 10 years since the ban on using JSL in deaf schools was lifted, so there's still some stigma in using it and most schools still use an oral approach rather than a signed one. There is also the problem that you need to know a
lot of kanji to read Japanese, but I'm not sure how that's addressed. This is also a blessing though, since each kanji means a discreet word, unlike English where the alphabet is meant to show phonetics. However, in both cases, a deaf person would have to be taught that several written words can mean something that can be said with a single sign. With signing you have your whole body to say something, it allows you to fill in a lot of details in one go, like swerving your hands with the sign for car to indicate that it was swerving and other, more opaque simultaneous gesticulation.
Since Shizune's Japanese doesn't seem absolutely terrible, I can only assume that she began learning it almost as soon as they could teach her to read. Since she doesn't have to know what the oral word is for each kanji or syllable for each kana, I imagine it would have been more a process of teaching her how to match kanji or kana strings to words and affixes in JSL and how the grammar is different. If she's been at Yamaku her entire school career, they probably were part of all this, since it seems their main goal is to make students who can operate as normally as possible within their limits. Her diligence and pride, as others have noted, probably contributes to why she's (so far) perfect at Japanese; being bad at it would be "losing". She probably does have some trouble with it, though, and I imagine it'll come up at some point.
As for Misha translating, it's probably much easier to go from knowing Japanese to JSL (or English to ASL) than the opposite, simply because signing isn't such an abstraction like written language is. She can actually see it happening, while Shizune had to learn Japanese without hearing it. That, and if we had to sit in game while Misha signed to Shizune, then Shizune back, then wait more for Misha to translate, we would probably get bored; unrealism for the sake of gameplay, basically. Also, Misha is probably so used to translating by now that she's gotten really fast at it.
Though I'm still wondering how Shizune coped before she didn't have Misha to translate.
