<story><title>Being deaf</title><url>http://davidpeter.me/stories/being-deaf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tocomment</author><text>So you learned English from TV?  I thought I&apos;ve always heard that didn&apos;t work.</text></item><item><author>devolve</author><text>As a person who was raised with two different household languages at different times, I can offer anecdotal evidence that this holds true. My refugee parents decided that their native language (Romanian) would be an obstacle for me in their new country (Thailand) and went for English instead. Then we got asylum in Sweden and I learned Swedish in kindergarten and so on.&lt;p&gt;In Sweden my parents started speaking Romanian at home, which I also picked up. It became a coherent triangle of languages, where home we spoke Romanian, outside of home Swedish, and English on TV and in school.</text></item><item><author>bad_user</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     One thing that does happen is that hearing kids
     of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a 
     spoken language
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This also happens inside families that migrated to another country. The parents do not speak the foreign language withing the walls of their own house (the foreign language being an inconvenience for them), but that doesn&apos;t stop the children from being very fluent in both languages from a very young age.</text></item><item><author>mechanical_fish</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I could try to find a deaf girl. However, I don’t want my kids to have an increased chance of deafness.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a classic case of premature optimisation. Cross that bridge when you get there. Thousands of other deaf parents have done so. Their kids were fine.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Even if they come out hearing, we’d need to make sure they’re raised right — who will teach them how to talk?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me respectfully suggest that this is just untrue, a persistent myth about language learning. Hearing kids learn spoken language just fine, even if their parents don&apos;t use it. (Parents have a natural tendency to overemphasise the percentage of the time that their kids spend listening only to them. ;) But kids listen to &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt;.)&lt;p&gt;One thing that does happen is that hearing kids of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a spoken language. Which is not a problem. It is in fact kind of awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dimitar</author><text>Works really well if you are a kid. You get really solid foundations then and you gradually improve.&lt;p&gt;This is why its important for your kids to watch Cartoon Network in English. I think this is how I and a whole lot of other 20-somethings learned the language.</text></comment>
<story><title>Being deaf</title><url>http://davidpeter.me/stories/being-deaf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tocomment</author><text>So you learned English from TV?  I thought I&apos;ve always heard that didn&apos;t work.</text></item><item><author>devolve</author><text>As a person who was raised with two different household languages at different times, I can offer anecdotal evidence that this holds true. My refugee parents decided that their native language (Romanian) would be an obstacle for me in their new country (Thailand) and went for English instead. Then we got asylum in Sweden and I learned Swedish in kindergarten and so on.&lt;p&gt;In Sweden my parents started speaking Romanian at home, which I also picked up. It became a coherent triangle of languages, where home we spoke Romanian, outside of home Swedish, and English on TV and in school.</text></item><item><author>bad_user</author><text>&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;     One thing that does happen is that hearing kids
     of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a 
     spoken language
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
This also happens inside families that migrated to another country. The parents do not speak the foreign language withing the walls of their own house (the foreign language being an inconvenience for them), but that doesn&apos;t stop the children from being very fluent in both languages from a very young age.</text></item><item><author>mechanical_fish</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I could try to find a deaf girl. However, I don’t want my kids to have an increased chance of deafness.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a classic case of premature optimisation. Cross that bridge when you get there. Thousands of other deaf parents have done so. Their kids were fine.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Even if they come out hearing, we’d need to make sure they’re raised right — who will teach them how to talk?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Let me respectfully suggest that this is just untrue, a persistent myth about language learning. Hearing kids learn spoken language just fine, even if their parents don&apos;t use it. (Parents have a natural tendency to overemphasise the percentage of the time that their kids spend listening only to them. ;) But kids listen to &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt;.)&lt;p&gt;One thing that does happen is that hearing kids of deaf parents become fluent in both ASL and a spoken language. Which is not a problem. It is in fact kind of awesome.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warp</author><text>I learned most of my early english from TV.  I grew up in the Netherlands, speaking Frisian at home and Dutch at school.  At the time dutch tv did not offer much programming aimed at children, the more interesting cartoons to be found on cable tv were on english language channels.  I would tape Transformers episodes and watch them over and over.&lt;p&gt;Later on I started consuming other media (video games + video game magazines, american comics), so that by the time they started teaching english to me at school I was already relatively fluent.</text></comment>