Hearing Loss
Lesson 4: Skills For Surviving Hearing Loss
American Sign Language (ASL) & Fingerspelling
When I found out I was going to lose all my hearing, the doctor and audiologist told me to prepare for it. I bought the Silent Call alerting system, upgraded my hearing aids as far as they could go for my loss, bought infrared, FM, shake awake, just about everything that was available that could help me in any way. The one thing I didn’t consider at that time was learning Sign Language.
"What’s the point?" I asked. "There’s nobody to talk to and I’m not about to sit and sign to myself." It took a good friend to persuade me to register for a class. She said, "We’ll both go and then we can sign with each other." Once we decided to go my husband said he would go too. If I was going to learn it, so would he.
That was back in September. Now we are about to begin Session 1-C and we are doing it not only because it helps, but because it’s wonderful fun and we love learning it. American Sign Language is a beautiful language and it is a language. It has its own syntax, structure and vocabulary and is not just English conveyed through signs.
Interestingly, ASL isn’t universal. Not only are there variations by country, such as Mexican Sign Language, French Sign Language, and British Sign Language, the signs vary by region within a country. In Canada, we’re learning American Sign Language with a few Canadian twists, which also vary from province to province.
American Sign Language is the preferred language of the Deaf community so we are learning about the culture too. We’ve also learned that fluent signers take shortcuts - where some use two hands, someone else might use only one – but the thing that all Sign Language has in common is that facial expressions account for 70% of understanding.
That makes Sign a very expressive language and the signs themselves are usually very intuitive. Now that I’ve taken three sessions, I keep asking myself why I didn’t take it sooner. It could have made life so much easier.
My husband often interprets for me in a noisy environment now. Instead of my frustration growing at not being able to get words, he signs them for me and I’m up to speed. And that’s with only two completed sessions in Level One!
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If I can’t get a word, we fall back on Fingerspelling, which we learned in the first class. The alphabet is very easy to learn and remember and though we learned not to overuse it, we haven’t had to.
Fingerspelling also helps me communicate with my children, who haven’t been able to take ASL classes yet. I hope they will at some point, but in the meantime, if they can "spell" a word for me, it’s just as effective.
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I strongly recommend you look into ASL classes and learn to fingerspell the alphabet with your family and close friends. It will help you more than you can imagine.
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