Or should I say unlucky you? 
Fairy helped me some with the answering. Some of the answers are her own wording, but I haven’t pointed out exactly where or what, because all the below is from a post in a forum that I go to. And no, I won’t be saying what forum. 
I removed the questioners’ names for privacy’s sake.
These two questioners had questions that had answers that I and Fairy felt were worthwhile putting up on the blog for all to see.
So here goes. Enjoy reading and learning…
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Quote from: Questioner One on August 02, 2006
I’m a minorly linguistically-obsessed type of person, and this conversation also brings out a few questions of my own. “Typical” communication between people is done via a variety of senses, so when you take one (especially one as present as hearing) out of the equation, the changes and alternate methods a deaf person uses in order to attain the same “functionality” as a non-deaf person is most interesting.
From a neurolinguistical perspective, I wonder how one who was born deaf views the letters of the English alphabet in their mind.
And finally, a last question, but something I’m equally curious about. For someone who lost their hearing, the answer is predictable, but for someone who never had it – if there was a way (via cybernetics, for instance, or even through some other sort of surgery) for you to have hearing, and there was no negative risk associated with it, would you take it? That might be a stupid question, but I have seen other people in situations (born in a manner that is not “typical”) who live just fine as they are and have no desire to “correct,” or in their perhaps more accurate perspective, alter their situation.
Sorry if that was way too long, I get very wordy/rambley with linguistics *giggles*
That’s like asking uh, a Chinese or Russian person how they think. It’s just misleading, a red herring, really. You should really be asking, “How does everybody learn?” That’s a whole lot more accurate. There are three basic learning styles. Visual, audio, and tactile. Everybody has a main style, with some sprinkles of the others. I’m mainly tactile with some visual. I suck at audio (and not because I’m deaf). Audio does not mean hearing, in this case. It means listening to somebody tell you all about something, taking in information orally, verbally, so forth. Many different methods that are done in the audio style. There’s a lot of deafies who excel at learning via the audio style and suck majorly at the tactile style. The same is true for hearies, sucking majorly at audio style but excelling at learning via the tactile style. So never be it said that being deaf or blind or hearing or whatever makes a difference in how one learns. What matters is the person’s brain’s dominance in things, their preference in how to do things, so forth. This also is a factor in why some people just cannot learn to lipread, no matter what.
As for the surgery question, most people who have been deaf since birth or toddler age – they are unlikely to want to have surgery to regain hearing unless they do not accept their deafness for whatever reason. The late-deafened people are much more likely to have surgery, the parents of newly discovered deaf babies are more likely to have them receive the surgery when they are old enough.
Even if such surgeries had “no negative risks” – the deaf adults would still unlikely want the surgery. That’s equal to asking a black person if he wanted to have an operation “with no negative risks” to become a white person.
And not just that. You know no one. No one. You have to rebuild EVERY relationship in life. You start from zero. Every single person will treat you differently, in both positive and negative ways. Your entire way of life is gone. Every interaction in public is changed. It’s like moving to Russia tomorrow and everyone in your life now speaks Russian but your mind is still in English. And they’re all wondering why Russian is so hard, what’s the big freaking deal?
The desire to conform is in the minds of hearing people.
They don’t understand why we, deaf people, culturally deaf people, don’t feel like we must conform, don’t have this inner drive to conform. To be like hearing people.
It’s because, of course, we know we are not. And will not be. They assume this knowledge is negative. That it’s a sad fact. That is a misunderstanding based on ethnocentricism. People born canadian are never going to be born american. They manage to get on with their lives pretty well all the same. It’s like that, more like that than anything else.
Quote from: Questioner Two on August 02, 2006
I dated a deaf girl (very) briefly. She was nice, but she lived in a house resembling a beehive with a bunch of other deaf people who got on her case for seeing someone who wasn’t deaf.
Is this normal?
Oh, definitely. Think of it as the pureblood Wizards who want their children to marry only other pureblood Wizards. Be friends with only other purebloods. That’s the mindset of a lot of deaf people which is very unfortunate and I, personally, dislike this mindset. I consider it hypocritical.
I am married to a non-deaf person, after all. A lot of deaf people would pretty much refuse to be friends with me, others wouldn’t give a shit. So it all depends on who you associate with!!
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Hope that was enlightening!!
Blessed Be!!
