Recently I had the good luck to attend a local community event that connected the local deaf/mute community with hearing community members to increase awareness of the problems faced by deaf/mute people and how to communicate with them in respectful ways and in case of emergency.
We first watched the movie 咲む and then talked with community members.
Here’s the movie’s website. Allegedly, it has UDCast and therefore should be almost universally accessible. I’m not sure how to use UDCast, but hopefully you can use it if you need to.
And here’s the movie’s title in 手話
According to the members of the community present, they asked that people try their best to communicate with them. Particularly by showing the mouth if speaking, not raising your voice (I believe all representatives were completely deaf), and doing our best to bridge communication with gestures or writing/typing when possible.
We also learned some important words like
fire
(flames/smoke coming out of a roof)
and disaster
I thought wanikani folks might especially appreciate that some hand signs are based on kanji, like the use of the three fingers to mimic the top radical of 災. I think it was also explained that the middle finger is held higher to resemble the kanji for fire, but that might be regional or I may have misunderstood.
I was watching this one during lunch and trying to memorize はじめまして and お疲れ様です when I realized that idk if I need to mirror my left/right hands. According to ASL signers online, it’s not important aside from sticking with your choice of dominant hand, but does anyone know if it’s the same or different in 手話? I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to ask in person and idk how to look it up
I found this video, it might answer your question. I also found some articles with titles like 手話 右手、左手、右利き、左利き so if you want to read further these search terms should help.
I’m excited to see there’s still a somewhat active thread for this! I’m still pretty early in learning Japanese (still in the middle of Genki I in addition to my wanikani studies) and I always come back to the thought that learning JSL simultaneous with Japanese might be helpful in reinforcing the learning.
I tried searching this thread so sorry if I’ve missed it but has anyone tried learning together and how do you feel about whether one hinders the grammar skills in the other? I know ASL has different grammar than American English, and folks in the ASL community aren’t a big fan of ‘signed English’, so I’m curious fi anyone’s gotten past the stages of just learning vocabulary together and had anything thoughts.
That said, are their any good resources for JSL vocab when your Japanese skill is pretty low? These youtube videos look like they’re mostly entirely in Japanese, which will be great for reinforcing my Japanese eventually but right now if I’m just trying to learn the basic vocab in both together it might be a bit beyond me.
That’s how I feel personally! Sometimes too it can help with writing too. Like the sign for disaster is based on 災 and I just learned またね but it looks like ま to me. A deaf friend of mine (Swedish) also commented on how many signs are based on kanji when she was researching 手話 and thinking of studying it.
My understanding is that 手話 does have its own grammar, but I haven’t found many intermediate level that talk about it much. I’ll see if I can find a video I saw before about it though later today.
Most of the resources I’ve seen/found mostly are videos that show signs for a set of vocab. In that way, maybe it might help to look up the sign for vocab as you learn them in Japanese? Since many of the signs are based on the kanji, it may help to learn like that. I think I might try that tonight personally.
also there are a few deaf japanese youtubers ( POC channel, mizuki shuwa salon (sorry don’t have my japanese keyboard ) and some others) that have like basic sign language videos about learning sign language, but also about their life.
there was one other girl, but I can’t find here channel right now, who is deaf and I think has some other handicaps and she talkes about being handicapped in japan with other deaf or handicapped people.
and to minna no shuwa there is also a magazine which is released i think every three months or so…
I tried to copy some of the signs in these videos and my hands are hurting already.
I thought BSL was bad enough…
I love sign languages but my joints don’t
between hand pain when signing and my speech impediment, I think I need to resign myself to being a text-based communicator
Yeah, I can’t really hold any positions with 3 fingers at all
I did a BSL class for a year so it’s not impossible for me to sign, my hands just tire and ache quickly.
Some of it is just that I don’t sign everyday
but even compared to my classmates, I think I just have really stiff hand joints that don’t do signing well and a lot of signs were really uncomfortable
Personally, I don’t think getting off topic matters too much, and it still feels relevant imo
Even if you can’t make signs yourself, being able to understand them is a boon and I think many deaf and hard of hearing people are used to writing out what they want to say, so only 1 person needing to write instead of more would probably speed up communication
Youtube creator Kanata does a lot of 手話 content! His parents are deaf and he does little lessons + also his videos are great listening practice because he always has captions!
Haven’t watched Silent but I’m on the hunt for somewhere to watch it now, thanks
I initially started thinking about JSL when my tiktok algorithm showed me someone doing it, but then I was watching the show First Love (on Netflix in the US) and got to an episode that heavily features JSL and that revived my interest. Not sure if it will continue to feature as the show goes on since it’s not a main character though.
Also the manga yubisaki to renren is really cute (and quite funny for me because the love interest of the deaf main character spend some time in germany so sometimes there are some german phrases and german culture thrown into the story)
I also just found out that there will be an anime for it in january 2024
わかる・わからない are really good to know too
