At the local night market I frequent a chicken stand run by deaf people. The Big Burly Cook made an effort to spell out something to me. Anyway… I’d like to make an effort to reciprocate with simple signs.
I’d like basics like:
thank you,
please give me (number) (Small/medium/large) orders (of chicken pieces). I actually don’t know what they’re called. They’re bits of chicken and bone fried up in a tasty batter.
Other complimentary things would be : You make good chicken, or the food’s delicious.
Don’t translate me literally. Please restate my wishes everyday Chinese, then please give me the signs.
Well, after I did a little research, it would appear that “sign language” is not as universal as I assumed. Apparently, Taiwan has it’s own peculiar brand, influenced by Korean and Japanese SL. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Sign_Language
Try the Taiwan Sign Language Online Dictionary, which has an English interface and features videos of the signs being used. Chicken, delicious, please: they’re all there, along with many more.
Saw the videos, not bad. So that’s what the beggar was telling me when I did not give him money by the McDonald’s in Taiwan. Or was he asking me to do something with him? The word… “suck”.
Anyway, if some fellow forumosans can put these signs into useful sentences please post them here. Again, I want to be polite and order food at the deaf run chicken stand.
Simple menu, chopped up fried chicken pieces. Only choices… small, medium, large. Hot pepper, No hot pepper.
Please post any other useful conversational phrases.
I’ve always been puzzled by how 10 is done with these hand signals. I mean, whoever invented this did a great job in making sure you can use only one hand to do all the numbers up to 9, but then for 10 you suddenly need two hands! Why couldn’t we just cross two fingers on one hand to say 10?
JP & Cranky -
Thanks. For some reason I learned the Int. Sign Vocabulary many years ago…and it done done me no friggin’ good here on the island. Now I guess I know why.
I’ve always been puzzled by how 10 is done with these hand signals. I mean, whoever invented this did a great job in making sure you can use only one hand to do all the numbers up to 9, but then for 10 you suddenly need two hands! Why couldn’t we just cross two fingers on one hand to say 10?[/quote]
The number images posted in this thread are not correct. Those are used by Taiwanese people in general. Deaf Taiwanese use their own hand shapes to represent numbers. For example:
I’ve uploaded a number of other signs from a basic TSL book I have. My book doesn’t have the sign for “spicy”. Since educated Deaf Taiwanese know how to read and write, you might just want to write down the Chinese character for spicy and ask the vendor how to sign it.
By the way, ASL (not SEE, Signed Exact English, in which many signs are initialized with the first letter of the English equivalent and are signed using English grammar patterns) and TSL are somewhat similar in vocabulary and grammar. This is because TSL is based on Japanese SL which is based on ASL. I’ve have a few conversations with Deaf Taiwanese, with me using ASL and them using TSL. The conversations were clunky, but successful. It was a lot of fun, actually. :+)
Does anyone else sign? In either ASL or TSL…it might be nice to have a buddy to practice with.
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