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Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:27 pm
by janz
Would reading an alien language you've never heard spoken make you appreciate its intricacies?
actually, it is very possible. This is like how most people started when they learn another language.
Well, my mid-school English teacher in China didn't speak English, but she could write. I learned English much earlier than mid-school, but I 'm sure you can learn written language without speaking it.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:29 pm
by stalk
janz wrote:
Would reading an alien language you've never heard spoken make you appreciate its intricacies?
actually, it is very possible. This is like how most people started when they learn another language.
Well, my mid-school English teacher in China didn't speak English, but she could write. I learned English much earlier than mid-school, but I 'm sure you can learn written language without speaking it.
Not when you're 16 though, unless you're some kind of one in a bajillion genius :p Decoding a language is a education in itself, not something someone just picks up and does :p

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:42 pm
by janz
stalk wrote:
janz wrote:
Would reading an alien language you've never heard spoken make you appreciate its intricacies?
actually, it is very possible. This is like how most people started when they learn another language.
Well, my mid-school English teacher in China didn't speak English, but she could write. I learned English much earlier than mid-school, but I 'm sure you can learn written language without speaking it.
Not when you're 16 though, unless you're some kind of one in a bajillion genius :p Decoding a language is a education in itself, not something someone just picks up and does :p
Back in China many years ago, there weren't enough English speaker to teach pronunciations. So, most people learned from books and books only. They even memorized phonetic notations for English. This created a whole generation of English teachers who couldn't speak a word, we actually have a specific term for that sort of English, "mute-English".

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:43 pm
by stalk
Further progressing in the game.. I'm now in the tea house with Misha and Shizune. My additional thoughts right now?

Misha am fired as a interpreter, now.

LOL. She has logic defying interpreting capabilities, I grant that, having that magical ability to interpret everything everyone says including herself at any given moment (If she ever ends up with a H-Scene, something MUST be said about her having arms of steel or something.....) however if I had a interpreter that 1) did not differnate between whether she was speaking for herself or for me, I would be rather irritated. And if he added to it anything but a professional personality, I would be furious.

That is mostly in regards to the fact that Shizune's lines are completely bastardized by Misha's attitude. If I was yelling at someone, I would expect the interpreter to neither laugh while say it nor yell it, but to say it in a neutral tone that does not contradict my own emotion. That said, though, when most deaf people go off on someone, they dont usually wait for it to get interpreted, so the communication is lost. When I go off on someone, I start yelling (since I can speak to begin with, just not half as well as a hearing person).

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:48 pm
by Warwick
tyren wrote:
Nachoman wrote:And now that I think about it, why hasn't Hanako learned Braille and transferred to Lilly's classroom?
Lilly is a year ahead of Hisao and Hanako as I recall.
They're all in their senior year of high school, so no.
stalk wrote:Misha am fired as a interpreter, now.
Considering how Misha's not Shizune's professional interpreter, I think we're okay. They're friends, and Misha just translates to make things easier for everyone. That does bring up the question of how Shizune would've handled regular communication if she never met her, though. Perhaps this'll be explained by the devs later on.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:53 pm
by DuaneMoody
Warwick wrote:They're all in their senior year of high school, so no.
So little tiem for loev :cry:

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:57 pm
by TKPsycho
Warwick wrote:
stalk wrote:Misha am fired as a interpreter, now.
Considering how Misha's not Shizune's professional interpreter, I think we're okay. They're friends, and Misha just translates to make things easier for everyone. That does bring up the question of how Shizune would've handled regular communication if she never met her, though. Perhaps this'll be explained by the devs later on.
Pretty much what I was going to write, but you beat me to it. Misha also seems to have some bizarre issues of her own that keep her from maintaining a "neutral tone." That's beyond the fact that you're expecting an energetic flighty high school girl to remain cool and collected.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:57 pm
by stalk
Warwick wrote:
tyren wrote:
Nachoman wrote:And now that I think about it, why hasn't Hanako learned Braille and transferred to Lilly's classroom?
Lilly is a year ahead of Hisao and Hanako as I recall.
They're all in their senior year of high school, so no.
stalk wrote:Misha am fired as a interpreter, now.
Considering how Misha's not Shizune's professional interpreter, I think we're okay. They're friends, and Misha just translates to make things easier for everyone. That does bring up the question of how Shizune would've handled regular communication if she never met her, though. Perhaps this'll be explained by the devs later on.
Well Misha's whole existence is a suspense of disbelief in of itself. Nobody would put that kind of burden on a student, not ever. There was a girl who aspired to be a ASL interpreter and had already taken many courses, and was just about fluent. She could have interpreted for me, but that would have taken from her duties as a student.

In the USA, it is a deaf student's legal right to have a interpreter provided at no charge for government related activities. And in private schools they will cover the cost. So, if Shizune did not have Misha (and in reality, she never would have had her as a interpreter even if she did exist) she would be provided with a in-class interpreter during the day.

During the off time, she would be like any other deaf person- getting by on communicating via a combination of writing, guesturing, or choosing not to at all.

Japan is small enough a country that most deaf people go to a school for the deaf, but they do provide interpreters there for the odd ones that dont end up there. But again, my nitpicks are well aware of the fact it's just a fantasy land, not reality.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 10:59 pm
by Anon
stalk wrote:Shizune's lines are completely bastardized by Misha's attitude.
Shizune can't fail to notice that, even without hearing. I wonder what she thinks of it? I wouldn't be surprised if she found it funny in certain situations, but what about when she's trying to tongue lash someone, e.g. Lilly?

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 11:21 pm
by Guest
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.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Sun May 17, 2009 11:39 pm
by stalk
Guest wrote:
Though I'm still wondering how Shizune coped before she didn't have Misha to translate.
It's the second time I've seen this come up so far, I guess I'm rather confused because it seems pretty obvious to me. But then again, I guess that has more to do with being deaf myself.

I mean... my simple answer to that is "just like any deaf person in the real world." People like Misha don't exist in reality, nobody has that kind of patience. Or maybe that's just me being jaded, I simply do not believe in the existence of a person like Misha, like one would not in Santa Claus. If I had someone like Misha by my side, I don't know how powerfully that would have changed my entire life. It would be like a miracle among miracles for me. It would be an even better miracle than suddenly waking up able to hear.

She would be my ears, my mouth, my confidant, my best friend, and fill in every gaps in my life. The loneliness of being a deaf person in a hearing world that I've had to struggle with since childhood, because I'm too far removed from any deaf community to participate, would be eradicated in an instant. I don't wish to be hearing, as surprising as it may be to people, I do actually like being deaf. What I don't like is the hardship and loneliness that come with it.

How did Shizune cope? A reality version of Shizune would have deaf friends on campus, associated with other deaf people, would go out of her way to avoid dealing with hearing people, if anyone tried to talk to her, she would walk past and pretend to ignore them, and if she absolutely had to communicate, she would write it down. Aspirations for high positions like being a student council president would not cross her mind, because that very idea would be like reaching for the moon. I know it sounds like all doom and gloom, but it really isn't. Deaf people look for what they can do, things they can't do don't enter their mind. As thought the possiblity simply does not exist.

That's the best answer I can come up with unless someone's more specific.

And to close, thanks for your explanation on languages, it made lots of sense to me.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 12:52 am
by Linear B
stalk wrote: That's the best answer I can come up with unless someone's more specific.
Ok, grabbed an account. When I asked I meant more like: Misha said she started interpreting for Shizune after she ended up in the desk next to her, so presumably they were in a hearing class. But she also mentioned that Shizune didn't reply to her when she first talked to her, which doesn't make sense to me if she had an in-class interpreter, since presumably they'd hear Misha and notify Shizune that she was saying something. However, I don't know if in-class interpreters are restricted to translating the actual lessons, which would resolve the issue.
stalk wrote: I don't wish to be hearing, as surprising as it may be to people, I do actually like being deaf.
I can more understand this from people who have been deaf their entire life, since they have no idea what it's like to hear and therefore don't miss it. It still confuses me somewhat from people who did originally have hearing, though, since I have trouble conceiving of not wanting to hear things like music or singing. I've been nearsighted since I was 8, and the idea strikes me as similar to never wearing my glasses and being absolutely content with it.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 1:04 am
by stalk
Linear B wrote:
stalk wrote: That's the best answer I can come up with unless someone's more specific.
Ok, grabbed an account. When I asked I meant more like: Misha said she started interpreting for Shizune after she ended up in the desk next to her, so presumably they were in a hearing class. But she also mentioned that Shizune didn't reply to her when she first talked to her, which doesn't make sense to me if she had an in-class interpreter, since presumably they'd hear Misha and notify Shizune that she was saying something. However, I don't know if in-class interpreters are restricted to translating the actual lessons, which would resolve the issue.
stalk wrote: I don't wish to be hearing, as surprising as it may be to people, I do actually like being deaf.
I can more understand this from people who have been deaf their entire life, since they have no idea what it's like to hear and therefore don't miss it. It still confuses me somewhat from people who did originally have hearing, though, since I have trouble conceiving of not wanting to hear things like music or singing. I've been nearsighted since I was 8, and the idea strikes me as similar to never wearing my glasses and being absolutely content with it.
I wasnt born deaf, I turned deaf at age 4. However I was much too young for it to have made a lasting impression on me.

I'm not at the point you are in the game (barely scratched the surface) so I would have to read the entire conversation to understand, but Shizune ignoring people sounds like what I discussed earlier- not to make a overused analogy but some kind of hedgehog thing going on where the best way to not get hurt is to not allow anyone to get close to you. The feeling of rejection over and over again by hearing people has a trend of causing that in deaf people. A lot of deaf people will outright ignore the existence of a hearing person, even going as far as to make a point of it.

But again that's just my first impression. Without reading the actual conversation and context I can't say much.

IN regards to policy of interpreters, it is generally discouraged for an interpreter to translate things not said related to the classroom. And they often will not translate student conversations, even outside class hours. They simply are not paid for it. However, I've had interpreters who had no problem doing so, because it meant they would have something to do during breaks. Instead of standinga round for 15 mins in between classes they get to chat with the students in exchange for translating for me.

That being said, I've often tuned out on the lesson and just outright ignored the interpreter. And the interpreter, not wanting to draw attention to us, will just start chatting with me instead. Part of the reason being a no win situation. As a person, I'm allowed to break the rules just like anyone else and tune out of the lesson. However a deaf person tuning out of the lesson is rather obvious because the interpreter stops signing. It would be unfair, however, to single me out... even though it is against policy. Confusing and like i said, a no win situation, however it happens.

But due to the distance in between me and the interpreter (usually about 10 feet or so) the person speaking to me would have to speak loudly enough for the teacher to notice, in order for the interpreter to hear it. That might also be why Shizune ignored her.

But again, I'll have to read the context for myself to have a better answer.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 2:25 am
by Caesius
You should consider offering to become an adviser of sorts to the dev team. I'm sure they don't have many (if any) people with the actual disabilities that the girls have giving them a realistic perspective of how they would handle their disabilities. Not that you should expect them to put a high emphasis on making this game terribly realistic, especially now that there would be a lot of retconning to do and most of us "normals" think they've done a really good job so far, but if they take your advice it will surely add a deeper layer to the game than just "Hisao learns sign language, fucks Shizune, Misha becomes irrelevant" or whatever it is they're planning.

Re: In regards to Shizune

Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 2:41 am
by Nachoman
Now I just wish that linguistics mayor hadn't been a Guest...
stalk wrote: I mean... my simple answer to that is "just like any deaf person in the real world." People like Misha don't exist in reality, nobody has that kind of patience. Or maybe that's just me being jaded, I simply do not believe in the existence of a person like Misha, like one would not in Santa Claus.
I once met such a person.
Remember that early-80's medication that made babies not grow limbs? I met such a baby when we both were 13 and entering secondary school. Of all his four limbs he only had the stump of an arm, but he managed.
Rafa (short of Rafael, Raphael or Ralph in English) didn't really ask for anybody's help other than to have somebody hold his chair when he crashed down. Even so, people pretty much lined up to help him around, but only when his official tag-along wasn't present. Don't remember this guy's name, but he would tag along with Rafa and help him with stuff that Rafa could do anyway: calibrate his pincers, hit the release that kept his forward leg straight (so he could sit normally), place a pen on precisely the correct angle inside his pincer, button him on the bathroom, etc. While I was pretty much the first in line to help Rafa, I have to admit that the most I ever did for Rafa was to stand below him while he climbed up or down the stairs (except for that one time when we were both really late and I picked him up and carried him the three or four flights of stairs).
But this guy was on Rafa's case all day. I think he was even excluded from PE, even if he was as healthy as a horse.

Come to think about it, now I know where I got my little mania about climbing up and down the stairs backwards.
Linear B wrote:Shizune after she ended up in the desk next to her, so presumably they were in a hearing class. But she also mentioned that Shizune didn't reply to her when she first talked to her, which doesn't make sense to me if she had an in-class interpreter,
In another thread dealing with Misha's likely disability, I have already wondered if her disability is some sort of illness resulting in progressive hearing loss. That explains so many things about her, like her issues with volume control, not hearing unless people speak at normal volume and her knowing sign language. With a hair like hers, she could be hiding some heavy-duty hearing aids, too.
That dialogue about Misha trying to introduce herself to Shizune could be Misha forgetting to add "but being my first lesson on a sign language class, I hadn't yet caught up with the fact that I would be sitting with some deaf people." Putting things in perspective, Shizune could have half-taught Misha, then they could have stuck as study partners and eventually friends. Then, once Misha's diagnosis said that her hearing was stable and she had to transfer out of the deaf group, the girls clung together.
And while I've heard somewhere around here that the game happens in 2007, technologically they are more likely around the early 1980's: no cellphones, no laptops, Hisao doesn't even wonder about owning a PC, no computer class. Hanako was disfigured by not having her burns treated with Gore-Tex while they cultivated her some skin grafts. Lilly depends on books to have something to read, without an electronic Braille tablet or a PC with speech-synth (and these last ones were available in México fifteen year ago!). And while it strikes me as odd that Shizune doesn't carry a pen and a block, by the standards of ten years ago she should be carrying at least a pocket-sized electronic organizer with a back-lit screen and a full QWERTY keyboard.
The only thing that does reflect the present day are Emi's running prosthetic legs, which are most likely carbon fiber or some memory metal: suction-cling prosthetics and paddle-type running-feet were experimental at best in those times.