Billy Goats Gruff - Learning to Sign

“It’s.. not that bad,” Mal offered, finger spelling M-A-L, thankful that he had a nice, short abbreviation instead of having to spell out Malinois, which may be his namesake, though no one used it.

The three boys sat in a makeshift classroom of sorts in the subbasement of the Candle Factory, near Kimura’s office. It was decided this would be the best place to learn, as windows were proving to be distracting.

Once again Katsu, at Kimura’s prompting, spared no expense, hiring a tutor to remote teach the Goats some basic American Sign Language. Dogo’s larynx wasn’t healing properly, to the point that it needed to be rebroken and set in the hopes of one day being repaired. And it wouldn’t do him much good if he could speak ASL, and the others couldn’t understand that, so they sat in an immersion class, set for 8 hours per day, five days per week, for a total of four weeks with the tutor deciding it would be better for none of them to speak only in ASL to fully commit to the language.

Cain was looking at the laminated alphabet sheet. ‘N-O-S-P-” Cain checked his sheet.”-E-A-K-” Cain check his sheet again.”-I-N-G” He motion his hand moving with slowly and and carefully.

Mal motioned the sign for sorry, putting his fist over his heart and moving it in a circle. Sign language, they were learning, wasn’t just translating English into signs, meaning not every word in a sentence has to be translated. “I’m going to the store, do you want to come?” for example, in sign language, is just Go Store, You come? While raising your eyebrows to indicate a question. If you were telling them they had to come, there would be no questioning gesture. It helped that the tutor was easy on the eyes. Even though Katsu hired her and she taught from Japan, she was fluent in both English and American Sign Language. Besides, Kimura was right there learning alongside them as well just in case Dogo’s condition was permanent. And Mal did enjoy trying to show off to his team lead. “No T-a-l-k-i-n-g”, he spelled back.

Dogo was picking up like a sponge but given his spectrum of power worked directly with his hand-eye coordination it wasn’t that much of a shock. The real difficulty was the context of what sign to use. There were no real hard fast rules to follow, there was a lot of open interpretation and expression that needed to be taken into account. He found he and his brother had a habit of going for a direct translation. They already knew a language so they often worked at making direct translations based on that language. Alternatively, there seems an entirely alternate way that was much more abstract and focused on the motion and imagery. That was what often made him stumble.

Kimura took notes as the lesson went on, often think how to adapt it with one hand since her boys would often have a hand with a gun on it. So learning to sign and understand each other with one hand was going to be equally important.

The boys did plenty of adapting over the next few weeks, incorporating whistling with sound language, anything to make things better for Dogo. They trained in the gym, jogged, shopped, and to support their brother stayed silent the entire time. Mal - who liked to sing in the shower where the acoustics were amazing, refrained for the entire course.

“And now,” the instructor said, on their last day of classes, first signing everything, then speaking in a low tone. “If you speak? You sign. Right now everything is committed to muscle memory, but as with anything else - if you don’t use it, you will lose it. We’ll reconvene once a week to practice and further improve your skills, but you can contact me in between if you have questions.“

‘Yea I don't think I have a choice in the matter.’ Dogo joked. Mal playfully shoved Dogo’s shoulder.

“Upside we can talk smack and no one will know.” Cain chuckled.

“It’ll help in the field,” Mal signed, on his best behavior in front of Kimura.

“We will be employing a few different things, overall this might benefit us long term with our team communication in a less conventional way.” Kimura agreed, motioning as she spoke.

“Whatever you need, Team lead,” Mal signed back. “Whatever you need.”

“For now keep practicing. We need to make this second nature. This can prove to be an asset when Dogo is healed up.” Kimura said. She wasn't about to dash Dogo's hopes and it wasn't like there wasn't a possibility of him getting his voice back, just that it could be a long road to fix.