You need to compare opportunity costs. It’s easy to name some thing you want to do, whether learn sign language or anything else, and list the ways you could benefit if you did it. But those benefits could be rare and weak to the point where just about any other use of your time would serve you better. How often have you had problems communicating a bill in a noisy restaurant, and how much time did you lose by having to settle it without using sign language?
(Also, if those things are really problems, have you considered text messaging? If they’re not big enough problems for you to fix by using text messaging now, why do you consider them big enough problems that you should learn sign language to fix them?)
This is a fair point. An assumption I had (but forgot to include in the post) was that most english-speaking schools spend several years teaching children a non-english second language, and very few kids come out of it speaking that language. So sign language could be a better default second-language to teach to kids.
I’m not super convinced that things would be better if everyone spent those years learning sign language, nor do I think that learning sign language would be magically more likely to stick than a spoken language. But I do think that sign language has some interesting possibilities due to the different medium of communication, and I rarely (if ever) see this brought up.
You need to compare opportunity costs. It’s easy to name some thing you want to do, whether learn sign language or anything else, and list the ways you could benefit if you did it. But those benefits could be rare and weak to the point where just about any other use of your time would serve you better. How often have you had problems communicating a bill in a noisy restaurant, and how much time did you lose by having to settle it without using sign language?
(Also, if those things are really problems, have you considered text messaging? If they’re not big enough problems for you to fix by using text messaging now, why do you consider them big enough problems that you should learn sign language to fix them?)
This is a fair point. An assumption I had (but forgot to include in the post) was that most english-speaking schools spend several years teaching children a non-english second language, and very few kids come out of it speaking that language. So sign language could be a better default second-language to teach to kids.
I’m not super convinced that things would be better if everyone spent those years learning sign language, nor do I think that learning sign language would be magically more likely to stick than a spoken language. But I do think that sign language has some interesting possibilities due to the different medium of communication, and I rarely (if ever) see this brought up.