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Grendel, you're mixing up accessibilty with ease of learning. Yes, it's easier to access the edcuational opertunties of the hearing world.(b/c they're right there) ....but that doesn't mean that it's easier for the dhh kid to learn via oral and aural methods (and I say that as a very auditory learner)
There are several schools of thought around the best way to learn languages. From my own experience, how I see my child learning, and what I know of bilingual language development, I think that accessibility and immersion in a language makes it easier to acquire and learn that language.
Given access to sound via CI, my daughter experiences English daily, hourly, everywhere, displaying variety and grammatical complexity. That's great, I'm not knocking this exposure -- we want this! But, like most deaf children of hearing parents, she finds herself in environments that provide far more of this spoken language input than ASL. The ASL she gets at home is basic, elementary -- what we know and usually directed at Li-Li. Political discussions about financial reform, debates about the cinematic merits of a film, phone conversations, over-the-fence chats with the neighbor, or chatter about whether or not we can afford a solar water heater are in spoken language. She needs more than we can provide, but not just from us -- we're not shirking this role -- she needs more than her whole environment can provide to be truly fluent in ASL and have the same ease in learning as she does with spoken language.
She needs immersion. An ASL immersive environment out of the gate is rare -- unless you opt for a school for the deaf (as we do). That's my point: ASL is not easy for her to learn without having the same level of immersion as she does with spoken language. Our approach to resolve this includes our wonderful bi-bi school for the deaf.