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A Perspective On American Sign Language

            
             In this semester my perspective on the deaf language and the deaf culture has changed and given me greater insight to ASL as a second language. Thought out my high school years I tried taking a language class and failed because some of the concepts were difficult for me to understand. When I discovered there was a language requirement for college I was nervous because I had such a hard time in high school learning a foreign language. I then found out that I could take American Sign Language to fill this requirement. At the time that I realized that I could use ASL as my language requirement I was naive to think that it would be much easier to learn than a "real" language would be. Boy was I wrong.
             In the first week of class I was over whelmed because of many different parts of signs and how complicated the sentence structure was to learn because it was different than English. What I mostly expected the class to be was a lot of memorizing of signs. Although, that was a small part of the class there were many other things that I would have to learn in order to fully understand and communicate in ASL. The first part of understanding ASL was its history. Like any other language ASL had a history of changes and obstacles that it had to overcome to shape what it is today. The main idea and root of where ASL originated was my first realization that ASL was a language. When I first learned that ASL was the same as it was in France I didn't understand why a form of English could come from and be the same as in France. How could this be I thought? Looking at the chronological history helped with my understanding of how ASL could have came from and is the same in France. I found out that when Thomas H. Gallaudet was asked to educate the daughter of Mr. Cogswell, Alice, he traveled to Europe to find methods to teach sign language. Gallaudet then returned a year later with a deaf teacher, Laurent Clerc, a student at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris.


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