I've been studying ASL for 5 years now, so you'd think I wouldn't be impressed that I can go to meetings that are entirely in ASL and understand what's going on. You'd be wrong about that.
In the past couple of days, I've managed to impress myself several times with my ability to understand and communicate in ASL. First, last night I went to a Deaf Culture Salon . The Title was Can I see a "show" of hands - a very clever take on the topic which was Deaf Art. I went to see one of my teachers presenting her poetry and moderating the discussion - and to find a Deaf person I could interview for a class project. I didn't expect that I would actually understand enough of the discussion - which I knew would be at full speed in ASL because the Deaf Culture Salons are supposed to be primarily for Deaf people. Well I understood it - not every word, but enough so that I could follow the discussion with ease and even understand multiple sides of the argument. The interview afterwards was easy too - the person I interviewed had a clear fast style of signing, but I was able to keep up and didn't need to ask him to repeat much or slow down. Wow.
Then this afternoon I went to the ASL department's weekly ASL lunch - today they were providing pizza and other goodies so a lot of people were there. I got into a discussion with the head of the department about my shoes (for those of you who don't know - my feet are oddly proportioned so I can't buy shoes with normal arch supports). Any way the teacher noticed my shoes which are cheap flimsy but very comfortable and asked about them and I was able to describe why I wear them to her. A few moments later my upcoming wedding became the topic of discussion and I was able to describe my plans for a very non-traditional wedding as well (lets just say leather dress, Wiccan and Shaman traditions merged, and Sweetie's family is Catholic). Oof, when did I learn all those words in ASL?
On top of all that, when I went to my evening class I ran into one of the students from my linguistics class in the silent lounge (she's also an ASL student). She was looking over her notes about deep structure diagrams and had some questions. Somehow I was able to explain the diagrams and why you need at least two diagrams for an ambiguous sentence in ASL. We didn't cheat even though no-one else was around.
So I know, at this point I really shouldn't be impressed by this kind of thing. This is to be expected when you've been studying a language for 5 years. But still, I'm impressed with myself today, so I think I'll just enjoy it. Besides, it won't be too much longer before I'm going to have to do these things on a daily basis.
Posted by Becca at November 17, 2004 10:35 PM