It’s more that English isn’t necessarily their native language, at least if born deaf. ASL is not signed English, it’s roots are French, and as far as I understand that wouldn’t make French their native language either. ASL is their native language, and it has no written form (afaik).
Well and French Sign Language is very different from ASL.
I had a friend who grew up a hearing child of Deaf parents, with two hearing older siblings, so he learned ASL and (American) English in tandem.
By the time I knew him, he also spoke French and French Sign Language because he'd been living in France for several years, and he had fun explaining and showing us some of the differences with his Deaf French friends.
Some of the best technical writers I've met were classmates from the NTID, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. But I think it was that english was in some ways a "foreign" language that made them so good; They went out of their way to be clear to the point of verbose, probably because it was unnatural and they felt it.
I don't want to sound judgemental, but I learned a little bit of sign language at the time, and the conversations I and friends had in sign seemed... Slangy. ASL is a language that has to deal with it's bandwidth limitations and the fact that it's not quite as broadcast as shouting is. Deaf culture involves a lot of physically reaching out and "Grabbing" the audiences attention; Tapping someone on the shoulder is an attention grabber of last resort for the hearing, while it's the obvious and only way of grabbing the attention of someone who's looking the other direction to the Deaf. Perhaps for that reason I always felt like Deaf people had no concept of personal space (Though my personal intuition is that it's actually literally about the little sounds your movement makes - I've encountered the same lack of personal space at Gun Ranges, where everyone is wearing hearing protection and you'd think that people would want to be separated)
Learning to read is a lot harder for deaf people, yes. For deaf people sign language is their native language, not the spoken equivalent, so imagine speaking one language and having to learn to read another.
I think this is a good question, because I had always thought of American Sign Language (ASL) as a transcription of English.
But I learned that ASL is a language all of its own, grammar and syntax are not always the same.
In college, I learned a bit of a sign language- "C Sign" - that is actually an adaptation of English. At the time, C Sign was the thing that hearing, native English speakers were taught as a way to interact with non-hearing ASL signers. That was thirty years ago, so things might well be different now.
I don't have any direct experience, but some of my extended family are native speakers of Apache or Navajo. These are different languages, but "mutually intelligible" - speaking one can be understood if you know the other. And I traveled in Finland and Estonia - mutually intelligible (utterly impossible for me to use either of them).
I think C Sign might be more of a "pidgin": a simplification of English and ESL that is not used natively, but can be used to communicate.
So, yeah -- it's not wrong to wonder if ASL signers are using English, or are able to read it. I believe the answers to these questions are "not really" and "yes, fluently".
(Perhaps the question was posed in a blunt manner. But that's written, online communication for you -- it's an approximation of spoken interaction, and often lacking in body language or tone. So it's often taken in a way that wasn't exactly the intention... :-) Yay, Language!)
That is because American Sign Language has a different sentence structure and grammar from English. It's a rather understandable result of a person being raised to communicate in one language "verbally" and a different language to communicate in text.
To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about and then sign, "What?"
A Deaf person reading English and thinking that "the word order is strange" is what I am talking about and it's explained by the differences between ASL and English. I did not mean to imply that Deaf people can't read.
I'm sorry but, I don't know how it's possible to read that and interpret it to imply that deaf people can't read. It's a strange question to ask. Maybe it's the word order that throws them off.
Not sure why you feel the need to respond with that sort of hasty, passive aggressive suggestion.
The way I read their comments is that it's akin to hearing that someone learned Spanish (which has different ordering than english) as their first language and asking, "So you can't read a book?". It comes off as wildly naive, with a flavor of offensiveness that you seem to be accusing me of.