I do not speak any languages other than English… a smattering of words in Spanish, French, German, Farsi and Hebrew is the best I can do. (I’m told my recitation of the Farsi alphabet is better than most of the native Farsi speakers I’ve recited it to, they usually tell me they don’t learn their alphabet with the rote drumming that we do)
But a few years ago I got all excited at the prospect of learning French, and about five seconds later I had what I thought at the time was the brilliant idea of learning French and American Sign Language simultaneously (I think ASL is as lovely visually as French is aurally). I thought it was brilliant because the two languages are so vastly different in every possible way, there would be no confusion as there might be when trying to learn, say, Spanish and French, or even German and French, which are at least differently rooted than Spanish and French but still share so many similarities with English that confusion would be very likely.
My thought was to learn in ASL whatever words I was learning in French and practice them simultaneously. Say “My name is Stoid” in French while signing it in ASL…
I never did it, obviously, but, assuming a person had the drive and the motivation to actually attempt it, is my speculation about why it might actually be doable valid? Has anyone ever tried to learn a second spoken language and a “manual” language simultaneously in the way I describe?
You’re assuming that there’s an ASL sign corresponding to every French word, and that’s not the case. ASL uses a lot of concepts rather than words. The skills you’re referring to are comparable to those of a translator, and very difficult.
A friend of mine is currently studying Australian sign language, Spanish and Japanese. She is good with languages and doesn’t seem to have too many problems learning that way.
Speaking another language at the same time as signing is quite difficult, because the word order and grammar are going to be quite different. Assembling your sentences would be tricky. If you used each language sequentially that would be much easier, but I don’t really see the benefit of swapping after every sentence as opposed to doing say, one hour of French, followed by one hour of ASL.
I studied French for three years and had just gotten to the point where I was capable of saying just about anything, but not naturally. I had to translate and ponder before I could start.
At that point, I started learning Japanese. Despite there being no overlap between those two languages, French was rushed out of my brain like rats fleeing a sinking ship. In six months, I don’t think I could barely form a sentence in French.
Sage Rat, I’ve had the opposite thing happen. When I was in High School, I lived in Indonesia and spoke Indonesian well enough to get by. I also took three years of Spanish at the same time. However, in my senior year, I was somewhat sort of a recluse and didn’t speak that much to Indonesian people beyond basic conversations.
Then, I returned to the USA for college, and in my sophomore year, I took a year of German. Needless to say, I did not speak Indonesian for 2 years. The summer after my sophomore year, I went back to visit my parents in Jakarta, and on the plane out of Hong Kong, ended up sitting with an Indonesian man. We spoke for hours in what I remember thinking was my most fluent conversation I had ever had.
My theory is that by learning German, I totally stimulated the language center of the brain, so my Indonesian was kept alive.
I’m now in Irish classes, and I’m getting tripped up on Spanish and German words that keep filtering into my head.
I think it would be difficult to sign ASL at the same time, though.
You know, I have often thought the same thing. When I lived in India I picked up a barely-passable level of Hindi, and then lost most of it over the years after I left India. But when I moved to Europe and intensively had to learn and use French, I found that my ability to speak Hindi had improved to almost the original levels.
You wouldn’t speak any other two languages at the same time. While ASL has different articulators than spoken language, the mental process of producing coherent communication would be the same. I think it would be a mess.
The grammar is, I think, going to be the issue. According to this site, “You can not speak English or speak any other language while signing ASL because the grammar systems are different.”
As an experiment, I’d like you to write the following French sentence, while speaking its English translation:
Translation: I would like you to be quiet, because there are children trying to hear what I am saying.
I grabbed this from Google Translate, forgive me if it’s a faulty translation.
This was my example, and I spent a lot of time with both sentences, and I’m just trying as an experiment to retype the French sentence while speaking the English sentence out loud. I can’t do it: every time I come close, I start typing the same English word I’m saying.
If you can’t do this with a language you’re fluent in, I can’t imagine it’d be easy to sign and speak two languages you’re learning
Hmm, I just remembered something I saw a lot at the Salk Institute where there’s a large important ASL research group (linguists). Some people fluent in ASL and English could perform SIMCOM, which meant they could speak English while signing the same content. It’s supposed to be very hard to achieve because sentence structure, conceptual organization, etc., are so different.
When you see ASL interpreters next to someone making a speech, they always mouth the words as well. Aren’t they mouthing spoken English at the same time as signing ASL? In that case, how is that different from speaking and signing at the same time?
There is a very tenuous connection between ASL and French: the original ASL was largely based upon French Sign Language, taught by immigrant Laurent Clerc from France. However, since sign and oral languages don’t match up, that’s actually no connection at all.
Look at it this way: if you had, say, four hands and two faces, you might be able to sign the same thing in ASL and FSL simultaneously.
Signers often mouth individual words, especially nouns. The word order will still be ASL. A lot of grammatical modification happens on the verbs, which are mouthed much less often.
Some less than fluent interpreters screw up their ASL grammar a fair bit. The same thing often happens with SIMCOM, where people end up basically signing in English (maybe some fluent signers can pull it off).
Yeah, French and ASL aren’t related, and ASL is closely related to French Sign Language, long with Irish SL and a bunch of non-English ones. British/Australian/NZ SLs are more distant.
I took French and Japanese simultaneously. At that point I had several years of French and about 1 year of Japanese, although sort of an informal non-class but in school setting. I think I had an hour break in between. Things got confusing for awhile while I had to brain adjust. but I don’t think it hurt long term.
Not quite the same, but sometimes children who are raised bilingual (tri- etc.) will have moments where they get confused and it’s detrimental. But all the research I’ve seen suggests that the benefits far outweigh this and end up being fluent in both. Not the same because adult learners have a much harder time acquiring language anyway.
I think that’s true about SIMCOM. People do it but it does change their signing. There’s less setting up of a geographical space in the signing, which makes it less natural and more like English.
