• 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle







  • I agree that it would be great but I have an anecdote you may be interested in.

    In college, I pursued a minor degree in Deaf Studies. That meant, along with my language courses, I took a series of “deaf culture” classes. Every teacher in the program was deaf and my favorite one suggested going to this deaf Thai dance performance for an extracurricular assignment. It was pretty cool - they used heavy bass thumps to keep time - but that’s not the anecdote.

    After the show, we invited the dancers out to dinner and drinks. My teacher only knew American Sign Language and the dancers only knew Thai Sign Language. They could not communicate well. My teacher took my notebook and scribbled a few things. The dancers did the same. It took no more than 20 minutes for them to be communicating fluently…and if something wasn’t clear, they reached for the notebook.

    It was amazing. I still have those pages because it was such a mindblowing experience