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by Sven7
3804 days ago
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How did you end up in Japan, if I may ask? I would assume daily life could be a little more complicated because of the foreign language. But thinking about it a bit maybe that helps when deaf. The local population I guess automatically make allowances assuming you don't know the language. I have deaf family members, and I constantly see them getting frustrated by people who assume the deaf person understands every thing they are saying, if that makes any sense. |
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Majored in Japanese in college, but I couldn't speak it worth a damn. I figured that if I really wanted to be able to use Japanese in a reasonable way, I should just move here, so I got a job assisting with English education in public schools as an ALT.
> The local population I guess automatically make allowances assuming you don't know the language.
I look more or less Japanese, so they actually assume I do know the language -- it's a bit of a shock when they find that not only do I not know the language, I'm also handicapped. (Deaf people in Japan don't have very much exposure; the few that I've met have tended to keep very strongly to their own Deaf communities.)
It's actually worse in some ways; in America, if I don't hear something, I can say that and the other person understands that. Here, if I don't hear something, it's a 50/50 chance whether the other person believes me or simply thinks my Japanese isn't up to snuff (which I can tell because they resort to much, much simpler language to describe the word they thought I didn't "hear").