Malaysia: Teaching Sign Language to Hearing Malaysian Kids is Challenging

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Sign language is a visual language, not a written language like English, French, Dutch, etc. Teaching a visual language is completely different from teaching a written language. Generally, you can teach yourself the basics of a written language by making connections with simple words of your native written language, but with sign language, it requires tons of time and concentration to learn.

You can’t do the same with visual language. Teaching the basics of a sign language for around an hour requires a lot of preparation beforehand, visual aids (keynote presentations), repeated demonstrations, and the list goes on. The point here is that sign language is a visual language and it has to be as visual as possible.

Sign language itself has its own and unique grammar rules and foundation because it is strongly influenced by Deaf community’s cultural attributes such as facial expressions, gestures, usage of space, and many more that I can’t list here. It’s like the Iceberg Theory. The language itself may seem superficial from the outside but if you sink deeper, there’s much more to the language itself. That goes well to any sign language in any country all over the world.