Is That A Challenge? Episode 10: Learning American Sign Language

Bobby and I live only a few blocks from Gallaudet University in Washington D.C., recently made famous in the Netflix show Deaf U. Several of our neighbors are deaf or hard of hearing, and almost every coffee shop within walking distance hires deaf employees (special shout out to Peregrine, we love you!), so of all the languages to learn we felt this one was the most pertinent for this time in our lives. Also, it’s fun to be able to have a secret method of communication, though after one month of studying I’m still not able to say “Hey I think that guy in the corner is a serial killer” and am pretty limited to saying things like “Hello man do you have a newspaper?” and “I am learning ASL.” 

Learning other languages has always been something Bobby and I have done together. During the pandemic we competed on Duolingo to see who could learn the most Spanish and eventually we hope to learn French, although my French accent is truly the most terrible thing I have ever heard. Being multi-lingual is something I think a lot of people find valuable, but a recent interview on the Tim Ferriss Podcast with Noah Feldman articulated what I think is one of the most important aspects of learning a new language: 

Tim Ferriss: So at 14 you set out to learn Arabic and there are many different flavors of Arabic. But once you were reasonably competent with Arabic, how did that change your universe?

Noah Feldman: It broke it. I mean, it changed my worldview radically and totally. And that’s because when you learn a language, it puts you in the thought world of the people who speak it, and you no longer are seeing them as an outsider, imagining what they might think when they speak to themselves. But you’re actually a participant. You may not be a member of the group, but you can participate because you can speak the language. And since I’d been raised in this milieu that was very Israel focused, very Jewish, there were all kinds of ideas about what Arabic speakers were like, what Arabic was like, what the world of the Arab people was.

And just to see that from the opposite perspective, it blew my mind at a very early age. And I think very few things have had as big an influence on me because I just realized that things just looked different from an alternative perspective. They weren’t necessarily better or worse. They were just really, really fundamentally distinct. And that made me realize that, to put it very bluntly, a lot of what I’d been taught, you could characterize as not having been true from someone else’s perspective.

It’s not that anybody was consciously lying to me. They were just giving me their perspective. And suddenly, I was hearing pretty much 180 degrees, the opposite perspective. And that is the most useful lesson you could possibly give a young teenager trying to make sense of the world. Someone always sees things the opposite way that you see them.

If you want to hear more about the history of ASL, how it relates to Gallaudet University, and how Bobby and I structured our 30 days of learning, check out the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or listen to it online here!