Part of it is the same as anyone who is approaching a second language from a mindset of a first language. You have ideas, you need to express them, and one language works very differently from another. When a Turkish person just starting English says something like "Even I English speak don't know, I England go want," it's because that's how a sentence works in his native language. With lots of practice he'll get it sorted out.
But of course as much as one spoken language might differ from another, they all have one thing in common - they are meant to be perceived through the ears. Why is that so important?
As a really basic example, think of how the concept of "up" is expressed in sign languages - with an upward motion or gesture. It may be coupled with a sign for other things - a bird, an airplane, a ball, a motion and more - but the idea is direct and immediate, as is the way it went up; quickly or slowly, suddenly or gradually. The connection is there. It's up, no doubt about it.
In spoken language, all this is replaced by symbols with no meaning in and of themselves - words. Spoken language is 99% symbolic. There is nothing in the word "up" that is in any way directly connected with a physical upward motion. Any more than there is in the Greek word "pano," the Turkish word "yukarı." They have no meaning until you learn it. Same for all the other little parts of language - those ideas of intensity, degree, nature of a movement for example. Spoken language takes all that direct expression and breaks it up into symbols with no inherent meaning of their own. And to hearing people, it's the most natural thing in the world because we're evolved to do it. But it's actually an amazing thing!
To get an idea of the immensity of that, think about telling about an airplane flight in sign - you take off, you hit turbulence, the airplane pitches, you are scared, you are feeling sick, finally it's over and you land. You can tell it all with your hand showing the motions of the airplane, your facial expressions, some helping signs along the way. It's extremely direct, effective and expressive and you can express very fine details of degree. And imagine that that is the way you are used to expressing things.
And then imagine trying to write that down. When you learn to write English, you are learning to write the symbols you already know (words) and are accustomed to using. An ASL speaker has to learn all these little symbols that he/she has no need for in the native language. And of course they can and do learn them, but they aren't writing their native language! Imagine a world in which you speak in English, but writing is in Turkish, and you organize your ideas in a completely different way! Many do it very well, but not everyone does, or feels motivated to put out the effort to. Heck, many native speakers of English get by with a bare minimum - they could use a lot more words, more exact words, but they don't.
It's tricky enough doing it from one spoken language to another because another characteristic of spoken language is that there's a degree of irregularity, convention, and of course little shades meaning - since you don't have this direct expression, you need lots more symbols to express yourself well. And of course there is a lot in language that isn't really "necessary" for the expression, but it's just there. Do we really need a hundred different ways to make a past tense? Do we really "need" a grammatical past tense to show that something happened in the past? There are lots of other ways to do that in spoken languages. Does Greek "need" the concept of grammatical gender, where a chair is female, the sun is male and a little girl is neuter? Of course not. But it's there, and if you get any of those things wrong, you will have "bad grammar."
For native signers, sign is the natural, comfortable language of choice; English (or whatever the locak spoken language is) is the language of necessity. Just like any non-native speaker community, some members will feel a greater necessity for fluency in the surrounding language while others learn what they need to get by and function in society. I think of my aunts who lived in the US for 40 years and never really learned to speak English. They did just fine, they had their community and dealt with English to the degree they needed to. But even after 40 years, it would never be as familiar, natural and comfortable as Greek.
Also - one of the things that "marks" many non-native speakers of sign language is that they remain attached to the hearing language mode of expression. I.e. because they are not used to using the "grammar" of 3-dimensional space, they look for signs for every word, or resort to "signed English" which to a native ASL speaker is cumbersome and superfluous. So it works both ways!
But of course as much as one spoken language might differ from another, they all have one thing in common - they are meant to be perceived through the ears. Why is that so important?
As a really basic example, think of how the concept of "up" is expressed in sign languages - with an upward motion or gesture. It may be coupled with a sign for other things - a bird, an airplane, a ball, a motion and more - but the idea is direct and immediate, as is the way it went up; quickly or slowly, suddenly or gradually. The connection is there. It's up, no doubt about it.
In spoken language, all this is replaced by symbols with no meaning in and of themselves - words. Spoken language is 99% symbolic. There is nothing in the word "up" that is in any way directly connected with a physical upward motion. Any more than there is in the Greek word "pano," the Turkish word "yukarı." They have no meaning until you learn it. Same for all the other little parts of language - those ideas of intensity, degree, nature of a movement for example. Spoken language takes all that direct expression and breaks it up into symbols with no inherent meaning of their own. And to hearing people, it's the most natural thing in the world because we're evolved to do it. But it's actually an amazing thing!
To get an idea of the immensity of that, think about telling about an airplane flight in sign - you take off, you hit turbulence, the airplane pitches, you are scared, you are feeling sick, finally it's over and you land. You can tell it all with your hand showing the motions of the airplane, your facial expressions, some helping signs along the way. It's extremely direct, effective and expressive and you can express very fine details of degree. And imagine that that is the way you are used to expressing things.
And then imagine trying to write that down. When you learn to write English, you are learning to write the symbols you already know (words) and are accustomed to using. An ASL speaker has to learn all these little symbols that he/she has no need for in the native language. And of course they can and do learn them, but they aren't writing their native language! Imagine a world in which you speak in English, but writing is in Turkish, and you organize your ideas in a completely different way! Many do it very well, but not everyone does, or feels motivated to put out the effort to. Heck, many native speakers of English get by with a bare minimum - they could use a lot more words, more exact words, but they don't.
It's tricky enough doing it from one spoken language to another because another characteristic of spoken language is that there's a degree of irregularity, convention, and of course little shades meaning - since you don't have this direct expression, you need lots more symbols to express yourself well. And of course there is a lot in language that isn't really "necessary" for the expression, but it's just there. Do we really need a hundred different ways to make a past tense? Do we really "need" a grammatical past tense to show that something happened in the past? There are lots of other ways to do that in spoken languages. Does Greek "need" the concept of grammatical gender, where a chair is female, the sun is male and a little girl is neuter? Of course not. But it's there, and if you get any of those things wrong, you will have "bad grammar."
For native signers, sign is the natural, comfortable language of choice; English (or whatever the locak spoken language is) is the language of necessity. Just like any non-native speaker community, some members will feel a greater necessity for fluency in the surrounding language while others learn what they need to get by and function in society. I think of my aunts who lived in the US for 40 years and never really learned to speak English. They did just fine, they had their community and dealt with English to the degree they needed to. But even after 40 years, it would never be as familiar, natural and comfortable as Greek.
Also - one of the things that "marks" many non-native speakers of sign language is that they remain attached to the hearing language mode of expression. I.e. because they are not used to using the "grammar" of 3-dimensional space, they look for signs for every word, or resort to "signed English" which to a native ASL speaker is cumbersome and superfluous. So it works both ways!
