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Anonymous
>>109983 Because some people go deaf after they learn to speak as toddlers (usually do to an accident, disease, or certain life-or-death medications), and some are born profoundly deaf (there are different levels of deafness--some people are only hard of hearing or deaf mostly in one ear or can hear alarms or loud noises but not whispers, and some people are 100% stone deaf), and it is incredibly hard to learn to speak when you can't hear other people or your own vocal cords properly. Reading is also hard for a profoundly deaf person not because they're stupid, but because it's hard to know what sounds a letter stands for when you can't hear or "sound it out."
Deafness isn't a side effect of any birth defect that causes retardation. They sound bad because they can't hear themselves speaking and not all parents are good parents and learn and teach sign language to their children to speak with them. Most Deaf people are born to hearing parents (most of which are too ignorant or cruel to learn sign language, and abuse the kids or force them to go to a regular school where they can't befriend anyone and don't even know other Deaf people or that sign language exists). If a Deaf kid is born to Deaf parents, obviously their lives are awesome because they're understood (Deaf parents can give birth to hearing kids, too, so those kids are often interpretors).
Deaf people, when given a natural language like sign language to use, are incredible. If they can communicate on their own terms, they are very eloquent, funny, and cool. They just can't speak and hear quite the way you or I can.
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