Trying to think in ASL grammtical format.

[Barbaro]

Yeah. Try this.. Learning Spanish, German, English, SEE, and ASL at once. My parents are from two different countries. As a deaf kid, I struggled to learn to listen to my family members' thick accents. I didn't learn sign language until I was nine year old. My parents felt I should be learning SEE (my first sign language), so I can communicate with deaf people.

When I was 13, my family and I moved out of the US and living in a different country. I didn't sign often because I had to learn to speak English and.. eh Spanish at once. Years later, we moved back to the US, I met deaf students and I was going to sign.. but suddenly, I couldn't think anymore! I felt odd as if my head was about to explode. I had to tell my brain to sign, but it blocked me out completely. It took a short while to learn sign language again. They also encouraged me to learn ASL and I was like," what the heck is ASL? Oh, boy. I must have been missed out when I was not residing in the US at the time." It took me years to learn ASL, but I don't sign ASL 100%. I am kinda of more PSE person. I still have to teach myself to think first, before I say or write. Dang my brain..

 

[shel90]

Yeah. Try this.. Learning Spanish, German, English, SEE, and ASL at once. My parents are from two different countries. As a deaf kid, I struggled to learn to listen to my family members' thick accents. I didn't learn sign language until I was nine year old. My parents felt I should be learning SEE (my first sign language), so I can communicate with deaf people.

When I was 13, my family and I moved out of the US and living in a different country. I didn't sign often because I had to learn to speak English and.. eh Spanish at once. Years later, we moved back to the US, I met deaf students and I was going to sign.. but suddenly, I couldn't think anymore! I felt odd as if my head was about to explode. I had to tell my brain to sign, but it blocked me out completely. It took a short while to learn sign language again. They also encouraged me to learn ASL and I was like," what the heck is ASL? Oh, boy. I must have been missed out when I was not residing in the US at the time." It took me years to learn ASL, but I don't sign ASL 100%. I am kinda of more PSE person. I still have to teach myself to think first, before I say or write. Dang my brain..

Wow! U are multilingual!!! That's awesome!

 

[Dixie]

Thats not too bad - I used to know Spanish, French, and a little bit of Swedish on top of my native English. Sad part is that Ive been out of school too damn long, and you know what they say - If you dont use it, you lose it. Well I have not used much of any language besides English so I have forgotten a chunk of it. I started to speak Spanish at work but then I realized I could not think of the words, lol. But I admit the more I listen to the spanish chatter on the line the more it starts coming back to me. One of these days I may just jump right into their conversation on a basic level of Spanish, but then again I dont want to discourage them from learning English while they are here. (I'll get along with them but I wont cater to em'.)

 

[Barbaro]

Thanks, Shel90.

Dixie..

Swedish?! Oh, my. Can you be able to speak it? I am told Swedish is one of the most difficult languages ever to learn and even speak. That's entirely true If you don't use it, you lose it. I don't know French well. I only know a few basic French words like, Bonjour, Voila, Merci, etc. Personally, I think the Spanish is probably easier to learn. I grew up in an oral/hearing world like you. Learning SEE was one of my most difficult experiences in my entire life. I do remember the first day I showed up in the class at the elementary school. Every student in my class was signing and I had no SEE knowledge. I had no clue what the heck they said. I even felt like an outsider. My teacher have had been teaching and encouraging me so much from learning SEE. It was amazing that my teacher was extremely patient with me. LOL I did even take an ASL class at a college after I moved back to the States. I have noticed I didn't lose some of my SEE habits such as past, and present verbs. I do like PSE far better than SEE for many reasons. My brain just cannot handle SEE 'cause it takes eon to sign one sentence in SEE.

 

[Silentwolfdog]

Know different languages? Cool. I wanted to learn Japanese, but of course even if I learn it, I won't have a chance to use it after all I'm in America, lol. Spanish is probably better alternative since more and more people are speaking Spanish.

But Japanese got to be cool language to learn because in general Japanese people love puns.

I bet that someday deaf people will have to learn Spanish as third language if sign language was their first the way things goes in America. Yikes! Maybe Spanish turns out to be easier to learn rather than English, huh?

 

[Dixie]

Thanks, Shel90.

Dixie..

Swedish?! Oh, my. Can you be able to speak it? I am told Swedish is one of the most difficult languages ever to learn and even speak. That's entirely true If you don't use it, you lose it. I don't know French well. I only know a few basic French words like, Bonjour, Voila, Merci, etc. Personally, I think the Spanish is probably easier to learn. I grew up in an oral/hearing world like you. Learning SEE was one of my most difficult experiences in my entire life. I do remember the first day I showed up in the class at the elementary school. Every student in my class was signing and I had no SEE knowledge. I had no clue what the heck they said. I even felt like an outsider. My teacher have had been teaching and encouraging me so much from learning SEE. It was amazing that my teacher was extremely patient with me. LOL I did even take an ASL class at a college after I moved back to the States. I have noticed I didn't lose some of my SEE habits such as past, and present verbs. I do like PSE far better than SEE for many reasons. My brain just cannot handle SEE 'cause it takes eon to sign one sentence in SEE.

Swedish really wasnt that hard for me to learn mainly because at the time we had a Swedish foreign exchange student living with us. Also if you read swedish some of the words are very similar to Spanish aside from the spelling differences such as the words Kemi and Chemi.

Heres some basic info in Swedish:
Hej - Hur mår du? Jag mår god. Jag tycker om rockmusik. Jag heter Dixie. Var ifrån kommer du?

and my favorite phrase in Swedish :
Far åt helvete.

 

[Barbaro]

Ha!! That's so cool. It seems not too bad to learn Swede after all. I have noticed some of those Swede words are similar to German as well. Those words are such as du and kommen. German and English have several same words like "orange". It is difficult to speak German, it requires a person to speak from its throat. Some of these words are pretty interesting like "nun" = "now" and "klein" = "short", "small"

I like Britain words. Some of those words are so funny and quite offensive! In UK, if you say you're "randy", it means you're "horny". I feel sorry for guys whose names are Randy. :X I love to say "Put your trousers on!"

If I drive my car and somebody else cuts me off, I'd be furious and yells "¡bobo!" ¡Dispense!

 

[Dixie]

yes, Swedish is very 'throaty' as well. You hear the words spoken as well as written then its not so bad thats how we did it.

Like if we wanted to do table then he would point to the table then say bord or tabell then wrote it down. For some reason it was very easy to learn the language like that, but the difficulty is learning the words for abstract concepts like time, certain slang, sending or receiving something and directional adjectives and verbs

 

[TalkASL-Boston]

One way to help you speak ASL and not English is to remove many of the small English grammatical or function words and pieces. Stop thinking about the following: the, an, -ed, -ing, be, are, is, -s, -'s.

Then try to use Topic-Comment logic. For example in the English sentence "It's important to think in Engish, not in ASL, when you're learning the language" has as its topic "the important thing about studying a language" and the comment about that is "don't think in English, instead think in ASL". Remove lots of the inessential ideas from the topic and it becomes "language study important thing" and then the comment becomes "ASL think, not English think". Put the two together and voila, you've got this sentence in ASL.

"Language study important thing...ASL think, not English think."

 

[dkf747]

Thanks, Shel90.

Dixie..

Swedish?! Oh, my. Can you be able to speak it? I am told Swedish is one of the most difficult languages ever to learn and even speak.

You may be referring to Danish. Although similar to Swedish, is very hard to speak correctly. Just try saying "rødgrød med fløde på" and the Danes will laugh at you.

 

[Dixie]

One way to help you speak ASL and not English is to remove many of the small English grammatical or function words and pieces. Stop thinking about the following: the, an, -ed, -ing, be, are, is, -s, -'s.

Then try to use Topic-Comment logic. For example in the English sentence "It's important to think in Engish, not in ASL, when you're learning the language" has as its topic "the important thing about studying a language" and the comment about that is "don't think in English, instead think in ASL". Remove lots of the inessential ideas from the topic and it becomes "language study important thing" and then the comment becomes "ASL think, not English think". Put the two together and voila, you've got this sentence in ASL.

"Language study important thing...ASL think, not English think."

And I admit leaving off the suffixes and prefixes is hard because alot of our words have them. Such as the following sentence:

The horse is running and it's mane flashes gallantly in the wind behind him. His feet make a steadying beat of a drum on the ground, its rider stands up in the saddle with her arms spread open like the cruxifiction of Jesus, her body at the mercy of the horse's ability to not throw her off should he stop abruptly.

Sure all of that is nice and juicy as well as descriptive, but the English language is dependent upon the adjectives and adverbs to enhance it. Whereas ASL is very direct - subject, object,verb and its done.

It would hard to accurately translate the above passage into ASL.

This is my personasl stab at it:
HORSE RUN HAIR MOVES BEHIND HORSE. FEET DRUM GROUND. RIDER STAND ON HORSE, ARMS OUT. HORSE NOT-STOP, RIDER NOT-FALL.