...I am confused. I've been reading posts on AllDeaf for a few weeks and I find that a lot of them are very difficult to read/understand. Like their are words missing, or incorrectly conjugated (past, present, future)
not me.. my grammar was already fubar before I came here because I was raised under two different grammar systems (Subject-object-verb[SOV] and subject-verb-object[SVO]).
For example,
Q: Was there someone who crossed the road?
A: A woman in a red dress crossed the road 5 minutes ago.
Subject: Woman (whom we identify as wearing a red dress)
Object: Road
Verb: Crossed across (when? 5 min ago)
in English (SVO):
A woman / in / a red dress | crossed | the road / 5 minutes ago.
But for Japanese & Korean (SOV):
Red dress / wearing / woman | 5 minutes ago / the road | [she] crossed.
Also the question would be arranged as : Somebody | Road | cross-go was-there?
One of the reasons why I found this forum is because I'm very interested in ASL grammar. I read somewhere that some aspects of ASL grammar is more similar to Japanese grammar than English grammar (such as ASL:"I have book six" instead of English:"I have six books"), so I want to study ASL more to learn more about the usage of ASL grammar, and why/how it came to be that way.
For example, I learned that wh- question words are often placed at the end, because it's easier to make the matching facial expression if it is at the end of a sentence. ("your name what" instead of "what is your name"). Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin all have a particle (ka, ka, and ma) that goes at the end of a sentence to indicate it is a question. Hindi and French on the other hand, have it at the beginning of a sentences (kyaa for hindi and "est-ce que" for french. Spanish uses an upside down question mark for written questions, but it is not verbalized).
I also think it's very clever the way sequence is expressed in ASL.
Rather than "Do you want to go to a store with me after work?" in ASL you can say "work finish, I store go, want come-with-me?"
It's also really interesting to me that word order sometimes makes a difference and sometimes does not make a difference for ASL. Such as:
lifeprint's grammar page said:
You could sign:
"I FROM U-T-A-H I."
"I FROM U-T-A-H."
"FROM U-T-A-H I."
All of the above statements are "ASL."
because it challenges my perception that grammar is defined to follow a set thinking pattern in the brain.
Rather, the evidence of flexible sentence order hints to me that grammar is a socially acquired thought pattern (an agreement to do something a certain way; learned) rather than something derived from how the brain operates (instinct, like how a bird knows how to build a nest). Also that it can be very loosely defined (like Russian) or tightly defined (like Korean) depending on who's using it.
Which then further gives me hope that if I teach myself to think a certain way, then that I can learn any language if I try
But to directly answer your concern, I'm actually baffled as to how I am able to understand much of what is written without giving it a second thought. I know not all of the posts that are tough to read are strictly in ASL grammar, but I haven't come across very many posts here that I couldn't decode the first time around.
Some posts do have a very unusual word order for English (My favorite thread to read on the forum is actually the ASL ONLY! thread, because it has loads of practical grammar examples) but then I think about the words used in that post in terms of Korean/Japanese grammar.... and it makes sense.
Vocab can be all memorization but grammar requires a lot of practice
