Our world is diverse. It cannot be said that there are people who are one to one friend to another, both externally and internally similar. So, another universe, which has its own properties, is also inhabited by those who are commonly called deaf and dumb people. Their perception environment at times different from how a person who does not have such physical deviations understands reality.
But it is important to note that the sign language of the deaf and dumb has the same versatility and colorfulness as that of a healthy person. There are more than 2,000 gestures in the dictionary. And sign signs are whole words, so showing yes and learning some of them will not be difficult.
Non-verbal sign language
Before proceeding to the dictionary of sign language, it will be appropriate to note that one of the misconceptions about it is the opinion that it depends on the verbal language that we use every day (sound and written) or that it supposedly evolved from the latter, and even that the language of the deaf and dumb was founded by a hearer. Not only that, it is commonly misunderstood that the gestures of a silent language are accepted as dactyling of letters. That is, letters are depicted by hand. But it's not.
In this language, dactylology is used to pronounce geographical names, specific terms and proper names. It is very easy to get acquainted with its basics, since there is a well-established alphabet. And you will be able to easily communicate with a deaf-mute, pronouncing the word with the help of gestures by letter. The sign language for the deaf in Russian dactylology has 33 dactyl signs.
Sign language lessons
More detailed information about the language of the deaf and dumb can be found in the book by Zaitseva G.L. "Gesture speech". Let's take a closer look at the most common gestures.
If you ask yourself the question: “Do I, a healthy person, need to know such a language?”, The answer is simple - there is not much knowledge sometimes, sometimes they are unclaimed. But perhaps someday, thanks to them, you will be able to help, for example, a lost deaf-mute.
There are many languages in the world today, but the sign language of the deaf and dumb has a special place. In the XVIII century, for communication among themselves, a special alphabet of the deaf-mutes was invented, which subsequently transformed from many branches and interpretations into international language gesturally. He and his alphabet are based on hand gestures, facial expressions and various turns of the body. Let's take a closer look at this language.
Where can you learn gestuno
Zhestuno was not popular in Russia and there were only 3 sign language interpreters per 100 deaf and dumb in Russia, while in the West there are 30 such people. Amendments to the Disability Protection Act in 2012 helped develop sign language. In addition to obtaining official status, training began in the relevant institutions for the training and retraining of interested people. As a result, the percentage of those wishing to learn gestuno has increased dramatically..
There are many ways to learn gestuno. One of them is that training is carried out in special classes. Get necessary knowledge can be done in the following ways:
- In deaf and dumb communities in your city, where free classes are provided for everyone. A few months will help to study the basic aspects of gestology and test the existing knowledge in a practical way.
- Institutes and colleges often have in their educational programs sign language subject. Most often these are the specialties of linguistics and sociology. Those who are or plan to be students can get acquainted with gestuno for free.
- If you could not find free courses, then there are professional paid courses that are held on the basis of institutes, medical centers and special schools for the deaf.
Having learned about the places where gestuno is taught, let's move on to the structure of teaching the language of the deaf and dumb.
The structure of learning the language of the deaf and dumb
There are 3 levels of gestuno mastering with the following skills:
- At level 1, for all beginners, the basics, the alphabet, the norms of vocabulary with practical exercises;
- Level 2 is suitable for those who already have basic skills and want to acquire the ability to translate from gesture to normal;
- And already the 3rd level allows you to improve your skills in linguistics and study translation in depth in a synchronous and sequential form.
Each level lasts 3 months or 50 academic hours. At the end of the course you will have a special certificate confirming your level. However, it should not be regarded as evidence of the qualifications of a sign interpreter, for which you need to pass a special commission. You can try to pass it after the second course.
How to learn a deaf and dumb language yourself
In addition to the methods listed above, there is an opportunity to study gestuno with the help of a self-instruction manual. The following resources will help here:
- Websites to help learn gestuno, the most popular "City of Signs". A lot of useful information can be found on social networks, where specialized Gestuno groups are located. With their help, theory and practice are worked out together with like-minded people.
- Especially for mobile devices, applications with alphabets and pictures in sign language are created. Just download the program and free time work with the necessary information.
- Books are a great help in learning zhestuno, but only for those who are ready to put in extra effort in their studies and endure. After all, there will not be a teacher nearby who will give clues. This means that it will take more time to analyze the material.
- A good option in this case is videos with teachers' speeches, but no one will correct you. The main advantage is that the material is diverse, understandable and clearly explained.
Each person independently chooses one way or another. But most people, due to lack of time, prefer to learn sign language on their own.
An example of a video lesson on learning sign language.
Starting self-study
There is one feature in the study of gestuno: I often confuse it with the image of individual letters with my hands. Dactylology is used for proper names, for example, cities, names of people, places, or for a word without a special gesture. This is important to consider when starting classes.
After choosing a specific option for self-study, you need to find information resources and choose the best ones for your level.
The first step is to learn the alphabet. Having gained confidence in the dactyl alphabet, you can switch to non-verbal sign language. Plan classes based on specific difficulty levels. Gradually you will improve your own skills in gesture.
The most effective option that allows you to learn a language is to communicate with a native speaker. Even self-study involves the search for an interlocutor. Thanks to this, you will be able to competently express your thoughts and begin to understand the thoughts of a person.
Gestuno is by no means the easiest language to learn. In addition, it is easy to confuse it with the dactyl alphabet. But after a certain time, you can achieve significant success. The main thing is not to forget about training and supplement theoretical knowledge with practice. Sign language is no more difficult than a foreign language. We wish you to gain strength and patience, because after that you will be able to get the desired result!
Video
You will find the first sign language lesson in this video.
It all started again with the series. Although, to be completely accurate, then from a beautiful interior. I was looking for series with interiors from Greg Grande, the same one who was the artist on .
So I came across the series "They were mixed up in the hospital."
It is about two girls who were mistakenly confused by doctors in the maternity hospital, and the families found out about it only when the daughters were 16 years old. This is where the series begins, and then everything seems to be as usual: first love, conflicts with parents, disputes between the parents themselves, rivalry at school, parting and trying on. Oh yes, all this in beautiful interiors.
The trick is that one of the main characters is deaf.
She became deaf after an illness at the age of two and now wears a hearing aid, goes to a school for the deaf and speaks sign language. And the plot twists around it too.
I became seriously interested when I started watching interviews with actors and found out that some of the actors are really deaf.
Actress Cathy Leclerc, who plays main character- Meniere's disease, the syndromes of which include hearing loss and dizziness. The disease does not prevent her from working, but it helps to talk about this diagnosis in an interview and more people go to the doctors to get checked out.
Even at school, Kathy learned sign language. Imagine, in the States, you can easily choose a sign language as a second language for learning.
One of the episodes of the series is filmed entirely in sign language, not a single word is used in it. At the very beginning, the two main actresses appear, who warn the audience, they say, do not worry, everything is fine with your TV, but some of the scenes will be filmed in complete silence.
This is so cool! talk about people with special needs not with short commercials or tear-jerking speeches.
I watched the series and realized that people with disabilities are not only the people we imagine in wheelchairs.
Oh, this stereotype, firmly settled in my head thanks to the sign on the windows of cars and on the pavement of parking lots.
And so I ran into a deaf company at a crossroads. I remembered that at the age of eight I myself suffered a serious otitis media with the risk of losing part of my hearing. The organizers of the event, who invited me as a speaker, asked me to speak louder, as there was a participant in the hall with a hearing aid.
It felt like the universe was desperately hinting to me, “Would you like to learn sign language?”
I entered into the search "training in sign language" and very quickly found in St. Petersburg school of sign language "Image". The school is located on the territory of the Herzen Pedagogical University, which means that at least twice a week I find myself in the very center of the city.
The university campus that I need to completely cross - from the checkpoint with a strict security guard to building 20, our teacher Denis Aleksandrovich - “So, you already learn these gestures at home, now there is no time to spend on this” (in fact, he is very cool!) - all this brings me back to the nostalgia for the student past.
Training twice a week for two months. This is an express course, the regular course lasts four months. The session goes on for an hour and a half. What you need to learn something new and not get tired. And most importantly - no sportswear hated by me in a bag, changing clothes and showering in open booths. In general, one hundred thousand five hundred times better than sports.
There are many students in the group. One of my classmates born in 2000. Imagine! I thought they were still somewhere kindergarten and they are already in higher education. It's hard for me to believe this. But there are also older students like me.
Most of my classmates ended up in class for the same reason I did. Interesting.
Only a few classes have passed, and I can already tell about myself, what my name is, what I do, how old I am and what year I was born. I can talk about my family and keep the conversation going: “Do you have a dog?” "No, I don't have a dog, I have a cat."
It's funny, but incredibly exciting.
Some interesting things about sign language
- The sign language in different countries is different, in our country it is Russian Sign Language (RSL). For some reason, this is terribly disappointing for everyone, so, they say, they could agree on one language and they would have super-strength.
- Dactylology is a form of speech where each letter is transmitted as a sign, but it is not a sign language. For example, you can dactylize a name or a foreign word for which there is no sign yet.
- Deaf people read lips, so it is important for them to see not only the hands that show gestures, but also the lips that pronounce words.
- Sign language has a different grammar and therefore uses a different word order. For example, a question word is always placed at the end of a sentence.
- A sign language is not a tracing-paper from a real language, but a full-fledged language with its own linguistic features, structure, and grammar. In sign language, the form of the sign is important, its localization (the same gesture at the forehead and at the chest means different things), the nature of the movement and the non-manual component (facial expressions, turn of the body, head).
What I like most about my studies is that for the first time I try not to be an excellent student.
There is no need to write down anything in the lessons - I put the notebook out of my bag after the first meeting. Yes, there are homework assignments, but I don't always do them. No grades or tests. I remember well what they say in class and that's enough for me.
Few people have encountered the problem of communicating with deaf people. Even fewer people understand what such speech is based on. One of the misconceptions is that the sign language of the deaf and dumb was invented only by hearing people, and that it depends on ordinary speech. Actually it is not. The second misconception is that sign languages include dactyling of letters, that is, the image of letters with hands.
Dactylology shows words one letter at a time, while sign signs show them in their entirety. There are more than 2000 such gesture words in dictionaries for the deaf. Some of them are quickly remembered and easily depicted.
The concept of "sign language"
The sign language of the deaf is independent language, which arose naturally, or created artificially. It consists of a combination of gestures that are made by hands and complemented by facial expressions, body position, and lip movement. It is used most often for the purpose of communication among deaf or hard of hearing people.
How did sign languages originate?
Most of us tend to think that deaf sign language actually originated among people with hearing. They used gestures for silent communication. Be that as it may, people with a defect in speech and hearing use it.
An interesting fact is that only 1.5% of people in the world are completely deaf. The largest number Hearing-impaired residents are found in Brazil, among the Urubu tribe. There is one deaf child for every 75 children born. This was the reason that all representatives of the Urubu are familiar with sign language.
At all times there was a question of how to learn the sign language of the deaf and dumb. Moreover, each region has its own. The problem of the emergence of a common language in large areas began to be considered from the middle of the 18th century. At this time, educational and educational centers for children with hearing problems began to appear in France and Germany.
The task of teachers was to teach children the written form of their native language. For explanations, the gestures used among the deaf and dumb were taken as a basis. On their basis, a gestural interpretation of French and German gradually arose. That is, gestural speech is largely artificially created. Everyone can understand and use such speech.
Teaching the language of the dumb in the past
The sign language of the deaf and dumb in each country is different. This is due to the fact that the gestures taken as a basis could be interpreted differently in different states. So, for example, teachers from France were invited to the USA to create their own school for the deaf. It was the teacher Laurent Clerc who developed this trend in America in the 18th century. But the UK did not take the ready-made language, adopting only the methods of deaf pedagogy. This is what caused the fact that American for the deaf is similar to French, and cannot have anything in common with English.
In Russia, things were even more complicated. The first school for the deaf appeared here at the very beginning of the 19th century. In Pavlovsk, the knowledge and practice of French teachers were used. And half a century later, an educational institution was opened in Moscow, which adopted the experience of German specialists. The struggle of these two schools can be traced in the country today.
Gesture speech is not verbal tracing paper. At the same time, its structure and history have not been studied by anyone for a long time. Only in the second half of the last century, scientists appeared who proved that the language for the deaf is a full-fledged linguistic system. And it has its own morphological and syntactic features.
Gesture communication
In order to understand the silent language, the gestures of which differ depending on the state, it is necessary to decide where it will be needed. In particular, Russian dactylology has 33 dactyl signs. The book by G. L. Zaitseva entitled “Sign speech. Dactylology” is suitable for studying the sign language of the deaf and dumb for Russia. Learning words will take time and will require a lot of practice.
For example, here are a few descriptions of gestures and their meanings:
- hands raised to the level of the chin and bent at the elbows, interconnected by the tips of the fingers, mean the word "house";
- circular rotations simultaneously with two hands in the thigh area mean "hello";
- the bend of the fingers of one hand, raised to the level of the chest and bent at the elbow, means "goodbye";
- the right hand folded into a fist, which touches the forehead, means "thank you";
- a handshake at chest level means "peace";
- smooth movements with two parallel palms, looking at each other from left to right, should be understood as an apology;
- touching the edge of the lips with three fingers and moving the hand to the side means "love."
To understand all the gestures, it is better to read the special literature or watch video tutorials. However, even here it is necessary to understand which language is better to learn.
Gestuno language
The problem of understanding among deaf people all over the world became very acute only in the last century. In 1951, after the emergence of the World Federation of the Deaf, it was decided to create a universal silent language, the gestures of which would be understood by the participants of all countries.
Work on this issue only came to fruition in 1973 in the form of the first dictionary of simplified sign language. Two years later, international sign speech was adopted. To create it, the languages of England, America, Italy, and Russia were used. At the same time, the ways of communication among representatives of the African and Asian continents were not taken into account at all.
This has led to the fact that in addition to the official language, there is also an informal sign language in the world.
Alphabet dactyl
Gestures can show not only words, but also individual letters. It's not exactly deaf-mute sign language. Words are composed of individual gestures-letters, which makes communication difficult, making it longer. With the help of the dactyl alphabet, this is what a similar method is called, common nouns, scientific terms, prepositions and the like are indicated.
This alphabet has its differences in different sign languages. It is quite simple to study it, since it consists, as already mentioned, of 33 dactyl signs. Each of them corresponds to the image of the corresponding letter. To understand Russian speech, you should study the corresponding dactyl alphabet.
In our classes, we devoted more and more time to the history of the creation of writing. But this time I wanted something different, more unusual and modern. So the idea came up to tell children about other languages. Already in the plans are:
Sign language;
- the language of spies;
- programming languages;
- Braille cipher.
Gestuno is the language of people with hearing impairments.
Deaf people communicate using gestures - quick hand movements accompanied by a lively facial expression. These gestures, like any other language, need to be learned. They quickly convey information to the interlocutor. Where hearing people need many words, for example: Shall we go across the bridge?, one gesture is enough for deaf people.
This possibility is also used where it is impossible to hear: under water by divers or in space by astronauts working outside the spacecraft.
International alphabet of gestures. Each language has its own system of naming letters or sounds.
Sign languages for the deaf and dumb vary from country to country. There are TV programs in which the text is "translated" for the deaf. Then, in the corner of the screen, you can see the announcer, who silently gesticulates, i.e. speaks in sign language.
There are more than 13 million deaf and hard of hearing people in Russia. The birth of a child with hearing impairment in the family is a difficult test both for parents and for the child himself, who needs special teaching aids and, most importantly, communication with peers and relatives. Fortunately, the Russian Society of the Deaf is actively working on this front. Thanks to the activities of its branches, people with hearing impairments unite and communicate with each other without feeling excluded from the social process.
There are also problems: lack of educational institutions, where people with hearing impairments are accepted for training, the lack of sign language interpreters and teaching aids, allowing to master the sign language.
Russian Sign Language is an independent language unit used for communication by people with hearing impairments.
Sign language does not consist only of a static figure shown by hands - it also contains a dynamic component (the hands move in a certain way and are in a certain position relative to the face) and a mimic component (the speaker's facial expression illustrates the gesture). Also, during a conversation in gestuno, it is customary to "pronounce" words with your lips.
In addition to this, when communicating with people with hearing impairments, you should be extremely attentive to your posture and involuntary hand gestures - they can be misinterpreted.
The basis of sign language is the dactyl (finger) alphabet. Each letter of the Russian language corresponds to a certain gesture (see picture).
Knowing this alphabet will help at first to overcome the "language barrier" between you and a person with a hearing impairment. But Dactyling (spelling) is rarely used by the deaf in everyday speech. Its main purpose is to pronounce proper names, as well as terms for which their own gesture has not yet been formed.
For most words in Russian Sign Language, there is a gesture that denotes the whole word. At the same time, I want to note that almost all gestures are intuitive and very logical. For example:
"Writing" - we kind of take a pen and write on the palm of our hand. "Count" - we begin to bend our fingers. "Grandfather" - very reminiscent of a beard, right? Sometimes in gestures for complex concepts, you simply marvel at how accurately the essence of the subject is noticed.
The structure of sign language is not complicated at all. The word order corresponds to the usual sentences of the Russian language. For prepositions and conjunctions of one letter, their dactyl gesture (a letter from the alphabet) is used. Verbs are not conjugated or declined. To indicate time, it is enough to give a marker word (Yesterday, Tomorrow, 2 days ago) or put the gesture "was" before the verb.
Like any other language, Russian sign language is very lively, changes all the time and varies greatly from region to region. Benefits and educational materials updated at a snail's pace. Therefore, the recent publication of a primer for children with hearing impairments has become a real event.
The basic gestures with which you can communicate with deaf people are quite elementary:
The main difficulty is not even in mastering gestures, but in learning to "read" them from the hands. Gestures are complex - they consist of several positions of the brush, following one after another. And out of habit it is difficult to separate the end of one gesture and the beginning of another. Therefore, learning gestuno takes no less time than learning any foreign language, and maybe more.
We often see people with hearing impairments in the subway and on the street, in cafes. These are cheerful, shining people, completely ordinary, just having other ways of communicating. Deafness does not prevent them from being happy - having friends, a favorite job and a family. They can even sing in tin and dance - yes, yes, people with hearing impairments still hear music,