That statement was opposite hand across the opposite shoulder twice.
I am not well-versed in ASL BECAUSE I'M NOT AROUND IT VERY MUCH! I work in retail and have to keep my speech skills up. Nobody in my family down here signs. I was raised to be oral. I HAD NO CHOICE IN THE MATTER, being seven-plus years old without a language to work from. There were no other deaf in the small town I grew up in, two hours from San Antonio, and I did not have enough contact with deaf there to keep up the skills. Even if I asked the school for the deaf to teach me sign, all they had to do was continue doing what they were doing and withhold information about signing from me, and there would have been nothing I could do about it until I was able to read and buy books. By the time I had gotten out of high school, my path was set, because I found it much easier to speak and lip-read than to sign. That is STILL the case today. I have to let my interpreter know that while I don't want SEE, I'm not fully ASL, either. Smithtr, when you wrote that post that confused me, I had no idea what that looked like visually.
Please get over yourselves and realize that I have difficulty learning languages because of my late development of language. I FOUGHT my teachers daily in the second grade when they were trying to help me with my read and writing skills. I turned 9 in the middle of the second grade! I was very frustrated because I did not have the background other children had, and I had to catch up massively. I really didn't know what was happening around me verbally until I was eight and a half, catching words here and there, lots of unfamiliar words, and sentences that yet didn't make sense. Even today, I have problems learning languages. I'm not fluent in any other language than my primary language, which I worked HARD to master. I can learn the alphabet of the language and learn some of the pronunciations, but when it comes time to form sentences, I freak out and go, "Oh crap..." because I remember the experience of learning it the way I had to. Verb conjugations trip me up before I even step out the starting block.
It's a miracle that I do what I do, verbally and in print. It's like witnessing an ape speak fluently for the first time. Please ease up...
