VSL Lessons: Interest

This last week of service learning was my first week of Vietnamese Sign Language lessons. My class is run by the Sign Language Training Center http://ngonngukyhieu.org/ and is taught by Thai Anh.

What’s interesting is that there are roughly four different classes going on at the same time with many different types of learning in the same classroom: intermediate and advanced VSL classes and intermediate and advanced interpreting classes. Within these classes there are a huge variety of students who are interested in taking the classes for different reasons.

• Beginning hearing students-interested in improving their memory (one girl told me this), becoming interpreters, possibly other reasons…
• Intermediate hearing students-interested in becoming interpreters, polishing language skills
• Deaf students-interested in improving their Vietnamese
• Hoa’s(the interpreter who teaches some classes) boyfriend-interested in communicating with his girlfriend more/ learning more about the deaf community
• Me-interested in learning a different sign language, analyzing the differences between ASL and VSL and learning what deaf culture looks like in Vietnam

I’ve now been told by several people that my reasons for being interested in VSL are unusual. Hien, one of the girls in my class told me that I was “weird in a good way” for being interested in pursuing a career related to sign language. Likewise Hoa seemed somewhat confused that I didn’t want to become an interpreter. I think a lot of this comes from the differences between education systems in the two countries. In Vietnam VSL isn’t taught in universities, so the concept of being a sign language researcher is relatively foreign. Furthermore there is such a pressing need for interpreters that any hearing person who starts to learn VSL is automatically encouraged to take up that role. I have faced some of this attitude in the US “why are you learning ASL if you don’t want to be an interpreter?” (UCSD is somewhat unique in offering ASL classes not aimed at interpreting), but not to the same degree. The only people who really seem to understand what I want to do with sign language here are leaders of HAD. This is probably because they have learned a lot about the power of linguistic research to help sign languages gain acceptance and therefore understand what I mean by “sign language researcher”.

Furthermore there are a huge variety of learning needs in the same classroom. The majority of the students are hearing and are fluent in Vietnamese and therefore are having to adjust to the vocabulary and the grammar that is unique to sign languages. They also have to learn how to perceive language visually; how to look not just at a person’s hands but their face as well to see facial grammar and how to distinguish meaningful differences from acceptable variations of a sign.  The class is mainly catered towards this learning group. Lessons are written on the board in Vietnamese and then Thai Anh translates it into VSL and explains the grammatical differences. For deaf students he basically reverses the process signing and explaining how the signs are related to the written words.

I on the other hand already have the tools in place to learn a signed language, but don’t know Vietnamese. Therefore I get the lessons printed in advance and translate them into English so that I can understand the topic of the lesson. However this didn’t happen the first few days so Thai Anh spent most of the time explaining things to me in International Signs, classifiers or ASL. The problem is that I get confused when a sign has a different meaning in ASL and VSL… way too many false cognates! (DONT and FIANCE being a hilarious example). Overall though I’ve been able to learn a lot pretty fast, certainly faster than I’ve been learning Vietnamese, and am really enjoying the class. Despite the huge number of learning needs in one classroom it seems to be an effective learning environment and a great way to get more people interested in VSL.