I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.
My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
From my understanding a lot of deaf people don't want ASL to be taught universally in schools. To them, being deaf isn't just a disability, it has an associated culture. If you're forced to learn it in school you're not going to have any passion or respect for the culture. Further, suddenly having your culture include 30x more people with no connection leads to the erasure of the culture. Imagine if lemmy grew by 30x and it was all Redditors.
so lemmy would basically be the same as it is now?
but for real, im sure a some deaf people feel this way, but ive never met one. that said i dont know a lot of deaf people, only have known three, and had a coworker who was a certified asl translator, and my general experience in this is that most deaf would be more than fine with people knowing asl at a basic level
however you are correct in one thing, deaf people most certainly have a culture because a lot of culture is influenced by language and influences language in a feedback loop. and asl is not just english through hand gestures, it is its own language with its own grammar and slang terms and so on. i personally dont think any language should be gate-kept as i think language itself is a human right, but thats me. im not deaf for the record.
I mean the people who came over from Reddit were the anti corporatist left leaning ones for the most part. The remaining Redditors are a whole different level of brain rot.
im familiar with lemmy radlibs