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Volcanbaru

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Hey all, let me introduce myself. I'm senior in the highschool, and I'm deaf with CI.

As everyone knows it's not easy to learn how to speak when you're deaf(Well...maybe it's just me). One thing that I don't get is, why would people tell you that your speech is great even through it's no-where near as good? I've had speech therapies, family, and friends telling me that. Then when I go out somewhere to meet random people, 90% of the time, they don't even understand me. Not to mention, people also makes fun of my speech too. It push my self-esteem pretty deep kinda, ya know? I'd rather have a cold-hard truth or don't tell me.

Maybe I don't know; I have a really bad judgment on my speech. It's just that I feel it's not good enough. It's confusing because people are sending the wrong messages.


Edit:Heh, I meant to post this in Our World, Our Culture forum
 
Short Version: Why would people 'lie' about your ability to speak as "perfect"., when I know it's not.(I'm really self-conscious about my speech.)
 
I know where you are comming from.

I mess my life up big time. I let people push me around, and I always felt so bad about myself. The thing that gets to me is that people are always making fun of me.I get that " you can`t talk right" Do not mess up your life for any reason.Don`t let anyone get to you. when I get upset I think of Hellen Keller.Where I live at the people are so bad here I have no freinds because of my hearing loss and bad speech.:pissed:
 
Volcanbaru, I've been in similar situations. My family, especially those I don't see often like far-away aunts and grandparents, trip over themselves to tell my how great my speech is. "It's so clear! You have improved so much!" One even said that she couldn't tell AT ALL that I was deaf. Uh huh, sure. The 2 HAs, the fact that I'm straining to read your lips and hear anything that is being said,the fact that I still miss out on parts of conversations, and the absolute fact that my speech is just passable might be clues. ;)

But I think they do it out of love and discomfort. They don't sign. I don't see them much, and I don't have much in common with most of them. They probably can't think of anything else to say and want to be as friendly and supportive as possible.

I also had great praise from speech therapists. But I think what they were really praising was my improvement, not my overall speaking ability. Hey, they had to do something to make me come back to ST (I hated it) :P
 
Oh damn..........I have pretty OK speech, but every so often I run into people who can't undy me too well. Trust me............this is just so common. When I was at college and at summer camp and places like those, after a while away I'd have to "retrain" everyone how to understand me. Even people who know me, STILL have a lot of trouble understanding me sometimes!
This is YET another reason why I am so against oral only. Oral only only works if a dhh kid's speech is really really good. Why doesn't AG Bell and pro oralists think about what happens when a dhh kid's speech isn't totally easy to understand? I honestly honestly think they have NO IDEA how fucking frustrating it is, to have to repeat yourself a billion times, and not have someone understand you. It's EXACTLY like the way people with really thick forign accents can speak English, but it's incredibly hard for native English speakers to undy them!
 
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