Hi everyone!
So, I work in Fire Safety, which means I meet some deaf or hard of hearing folks while helping with Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans. And, honestly, it got me thinking: “Wouldn't it be nice to know a little bit of someone else’s language?” Kind of like how adorable it is when someone stumbles through my own mother tongue. It's the effort that counts, right?
I think my biggest inspiration came from a deaf colleague at a company I used to work for. He taught me a few signs—first up, naturally, "fire alarm!" (Because priorities, right?)
The real interest sparked when I had BSL interpreters with me during more technical fire safety training. I’m a sucker for learning languages anyway, but seeing the interpreters at work made me realize—hey, if you don’t know the word, just wing it! Context is key, and sometimes you can get away with being a bit... creative. Bless, they had to translate fire door component parts and turned out somehow my training slides werent passsed on to them before the training! Let’s just say, that was a linguistic challenge! I guess pictures in training slides helped a little
Will I ever be fluent? Probably not. But you bet I’ll try! Worst case, I’ll probably just make someone laugh at my awkward attempt. 😂
