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Thing about fingerspelling, it's just a series of signs and a natural part of the language just like any other sign. When you point to a bus and fingerspell B-U-S, your daughter is not seeing individual English letters but a series of signs that reference the vehicle. If you are serious about...

I'm not talking about reading and writing but everyday face to face communication. If a Deaf child is hitting a linguistic brick wall acquiring an oral language then I think that's a good indication that it should be dropped in favor of ensuring a mastery of sign language. Think of it this...

It's a tricky thing, really. Sometimes people are so insistent on a Deaf child learning to communicate orally that they're unwilling to give it up even when it's clearly not happening, and it can lead to putting less emphasis on signed communication in favor of other modes which is ultimately...

"A battle over whether the deaf should speak or use American Sign Language has raged since the days of Alexander Graham Bell." The problem with this battle is that it seems that those on one side of the divide blatantly ignore the fact that some Deaf people are simply incapable of oral...

To put it bluntly, your counselor is an ignoramus. American Sign Language is a real, functional language that is used by a distinct cultural group in the United States (and some other parts of the world). It's not about being fashionable or "in style", it's how members of that cultural group...

You ask why ASL is so different from English. You may as well ask why English is so different from ASL. ASL is a visual language, separate and distinct from English. It's not backwards any more than English is backwards. Being a visual language, phrases are constructed in the order that...

Ditto the ones who claim to have taught themselves ASL.

I've also heard that the certification exam for interpreters in Canada is incredibly tough. Apparently Canadian interpreters think the NIC is a cake walk in comparison.

The flipside of that is that if the interpreter genuinely can't understand the Deaf person then communication isn't happening, and whatever point they're trying to make isn't being conveyed to the other party. All the other party sees is an angry Deaf person waving their hands around, but they...

This is another one of those "it depends" situations. If the interpreter found the Deaf person difficult to understand because of their agitation then I think it would be appropriate to say, "Can you calm down? I'm having trouble understanding you." However, it would probably not be...

If that's the case then you may find interpreting to be extremely difficult because you're often working in two languages simultaneously (receiving one while producing the other) as well as paying attention to other relevant things in the environment like what's going on around you or how other...

It would help if your first assumption about the community here wasn't that people are being mean or acting like jerks. To that I will say welcome to your first taste of Deaf culture. As Reba said, you need to be humble and open-minded if you plan on being a terp.

Get some formal language and interpreter training, preferably college-level, if you plan on working with the Deaf in any kind of professional capacity. Frankly, it'd be irresponsible not to.

Begging the question.

But you haven't seen a dysfunctional family here, you've seen an isolated video of a father calmly putting a few bullets in his daughter's laptop. It's grossly unfair to take this one incident and declare that the family is dysfunctional.

Whether or not it's "normal" depends on the program. Some schools have a more vested interest in sign language instruction than others. The college I'm currently attending has several Deaf instructors, and in each of the five ASL classes, students are required to do some sort of "community...

I suppose it would depend on the context and whether or not the specific URL address is necessary to convey the intent of the message. If it was critical then the poor interpreter would have to try and sign the whole thing along with the problems inherent with such a task, which would probably...

My instinct is to use sign in a noisy environment or when the other person is too far away for me to communicate with without shouting or if I'm trying to clarify something that is difficult to put into words. My co-workers don't know sign language, so I get some funny looks.

Interpreters want to work, but they don't necessarily want to have to drive all over creation to get it, so they tend to live where the most Deaf people are. If you live in a smaller town where there are fewer Deaf and, therefore, less regular work for an interpreter then you'll most likely...

I agree. I think we're missing some of the context here, because I've personally never seen the IF sign used on its own to ask "WHAT IS". That's what the WHAT sign is for!