Aspies For Freedom

Yup, it's lonely. In the normal aspie/autie world of math I am a washout (I also cannot read a non-digital clock or turn a key in a lock without extreme effort), but in language I'm the queen. The doctor who diagnosed me said he'd only seen one other "linguist" aspie in his time. I speak four different languages pretty well and can listen to two more and make rough translations. I pick up words and languages easily and used to read the dictionary at night before going to bed.

Am I the only linguist here?

My Aspie brother speaks, reads and writes several languages including Latin.

I often wonder whether any of us would be able to learn a Sign language more easily than another word-based language.

Not sure, but I think I had hyperlexia as a child. Doing sign language for deafness looks hard to me. Mum said recently that I have almost as good a vocabulary as her (and she has a very large vocabulary).

I was recently diagnosed as atypical AS, because I'm not dyspraxic and also because my language skills are quite good.

I think it helps to think of language as not just a tool of communication, but also a system in and of itself that is very logical and which has patterns.

I think it's often thought that Aspies aren't very good linguists, because their communication skills aren't so good.  But if you overlook the social aspects of language, there's a lot that Aspies can find affinity with.

One of my obsessions from an early age was reading.  I don't have a very good imagination of my own in terms of creativity, but my imagination is good in that I can enter into an imaginary world created by an author.  So I read -- a lot.  

And I believe that's what initially developed my language skills, because I read language that was created by people with better skills than my own, and used those examples as models for my own writing and talking.

I learn very much by example when it comes to language, by which I mean I recognise and follow patterns, of structure, of tone, of formality...

To me, languages are a series of patterns; I mean I used to be quite good at conjugating French verbs.  I think that's the difference between Aspies and neurotypicals who are good at languages, neurotypicals think of language more in the social/communication sense, whereas to me French is something that follows patterns much like Mathematics is a language (which I used to be extremely fluent in), and also computer languages.

If lots of Aspies are good at mathematics and engineering and computer languages, then I think more are capable of acquiring advanced foreign language skills - the main barrier is the practice and acquiring fluency if you don't also have the neurotypical social/communication skills.

My mother tongue is English and I speak some French (learned at school and later used when I lived and worked in France).  And I also learned some Arabic (which I've used on holidays) and a tiny bit of Mandarin Chinese (which I used when I lived and worked in Beijing) although the tonal system of pronounciation is a nightmare for me.

In some ways, I think that a lot of behaviours that might be noticeable differences if an Aspie were talking to an NT with the same mother tongue, if you're communication in a foreign language, a lot of differences are written off as cultural differences and cultural misunderstandings, so if you accidentally offend, you're not thought of as rude or offensive, you're just a clumsy foreigner.

Oh, I agree with the patterns. When I learn new languages they just add to the sets I already have in my head-- and the massive dictionary (which is picture based lol, if I can see it in my head, I can remember the words in other languages very easily). I don't know about sounding clumsy-- I was told I spoke German pretty well, but then that's a little more logical than most. I do know that I have a hard time expressing things when put to questions-- otherwise I seem to do fine. Latin was also not so difficult, I could argue with the professor in the hallway in Latin and coached the other students-- but I had a hard time with Spanish and French. I can "ear" those and make rough translations if I'm listening to other people or watching TV, but I can't speak them or read them.

Learning new languages at school was dreadful. Picking up new languages, on the other hand, never posed a problem. I prefer to learn by listening to other people and radio-programs and reading newspapers, magazines and books.

I too am a linguist type in a way.

Although for me it's mostly reading and writing that comes quickly, then spoken language. For me being able to absorb and emulate/repeat language has always been a strong skill but an entirely unconscious one, with genuine comprehension lagging behind by anything up to a few years. (It was always really difficult for me when teachers expected me to explain grammatical concepts because I had almost flawless German grammar as a kid but even the worst students in class grasped the connection and meaning of these concepts in connection to the language better than I ever did!)

This also applies strongly to programming languages (moreso since they are written and not spoken) and has so far - I am 28 now - not shown any signs of abating (as innate language acquisition in NTs is supposed to in early childhood).

It also extends to other concepts to a certain degree although with things like maths there needs to be a certain level of conscious processing going on fairly early on and if comprehension is delayed as it often is for me, then learning through a kind of echolalia doesn't work too well.

However I can learn these things by rote, I just tend to forget them again fairly quickly or rather I easily become unable to access this information consciously once the period of focusing on the subject has passed. (I have been told I have issues with communication between the two hemispheres of my brain, but I have never been given the opportunity to have this examined properly)

My problem with learning anything the "usual" way is that I cannot really consciously sit down and learn something in a structured 'step by step' way. I pick out what I need (the Internet is a great resource for cut and paste knowledge) and patch it together to express what I want, and over time I become fluent enough to write without consulting reference sites or code (in the case of programming languages).

Thankfully I got away with this for a very long time (it had never really crossed my mind that you had to pay attention to the teacher in class, I usually read ahead, tried things out for myself etc. but did so quietly so that I didn't get told off as often as many other people on the Spectrum have been in school).

I didn't know other people learned differently until I was in high school, by which point

I have also become penpals with a young woman back in Switzerland who is a very strong linguist (she speaks about a dozen languages an is mostly interested in Nordic languages - although I have to stress that contrary to popular belief, Switzerland is *not* a Nordic country ) and she definitely has a more 'technical' ability with languages.

I also know a woman with AS who is a professor of linguistics (among other things) and speaks many languages very well, although I believe her skills are less "technical" and more similar to mine (e.g. they are practical in that she absorbs the ability to speak the language quickly, rather than having to learn it the usual way).

So yes you're not alone but I find that even though language is meant to be 'worse' for people with autism, that my way of acquiring skills and in particular languages is something I encounter far more in the writings of/about autistics than in writings of/about Aspies.

That self-aware, conscious and mathematical-analytical kind of mental state that you find in many such books (the strongest example for me is Liane Holliday Willey, she strikes me as so sharply self aware I cannot read her writing without experiencing her as a live wire throwing electric sparks in all directions) is just rather foreign to me.

Oops just realised you wrote a lot about what I was trying to say! I could try and excuse it by saying I haven't been around for a while so forgot about netiquette, but that would be a lie because I was on a lot of Doctor Who forums for about a year.

Anyway, I found it interesting that you mention patterns and logic in the same context, because for me this is the "either/or" aspect I was trying to describe in my earlier post. Logic only really comes into the process for me when it comes to trying to figure out what a word or expression means (figure out or look it up or patch it together from clues in how it is used in different places).

As far as grammatical rules are concerned, as soon as I tried to consciously apply rules to building a phrase, or had to give examples of certain tenses or whatever, I was at a loss and made more mistakes than most in class.

Yet I could write with very few spelling mistakes (at least if they were words I had come across before) and tended to use correct grammar in my writing once I got a bit of practice (I could write before I was 4 but I didn't express myself in writing, if that makes sense).

This may be contraversial, but I do wonder whether its really meaningful to classify people as good/bad linguists. You need only visit the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries to see that just about anyone can speak a foreign language fluently if they learn it early enough in life.

It's not really about good or bad linguists, it's about an innate talent and/or preference that has nothing to do with when/how NTs learn language (or maths for that matter).

You are of course right about anyone being able to learn a second/third etc. language if taught early enough but if you have a linguistic skill as described in this thread you don't lose that skill in the same way normal/ordinary language acquisition skills are lost during childhood.

I'm good at math but I'm also good at languages.  About 4 years ago I started learning Spanish, and about 5 months ago I started learning French (the language spoken by my dad's side of the family).  Some of my classmates in my French class last semester and my French class this semester are finding that the more French they learn, the less Spanish they are able to remember.  I find that that's not the case with me.  Even though I'm learning French now, I still remember Spanish quite well.  I just don't practice it quite as often as I should.

I find it much easier to understand and speak a language when I'm a particular country where it's the native language.  E.g. I find it quite hard to watch a French film here in England, because my ear isn't quite 'tuned in' as it would be if I was surrounded by French in France.

However, there's another, bit of a peculiar glitch in my matrix when it comes to languages.  Often, in China, someone would say something to me, and my brain would register:  'this is a foreign language', and I would understand if someone asked a question, my brain would process the translation from Chinese > English, and I would understand the meaning of the question.  But, if I didn't have the Chinese vocabulary to respond, or even if I did, but I had to think about it, my brain would draft answers in French, or Arabic.  

It's like my brain said:  incoming foreign language
Draft response: outgoing foreign language

But my response wouldn't necessarily be in the language the question was asked, sometimes another random foreign language would pop up, and I'd have to really concentrate and think about formulating a sentence/response in Chinese.

Actually, I just thought of another example of that:

I went on holiday for the millennium celebrations with another English friend (who had lived and worked in Egypt and spoke Arabic) and about a dozen French people, who also happened to be fluent in English and Arabic.

We used to have these tri-lingual conversations.  My English friend would speak in French and a little bit of Arabic with his French friends, but while I could understand what they were saying, my brain couldn't formulate the responses fast enough in French, so I'd hear questions in French with a smattering of Arabic and respond in English.

I do think it's like being bilingual in English and C+ though, programing languages are just different languages, and if aspies can be fluent in C+, Java, ADA, Visual Basic, or whatever...

That's the problem -- I've never been in an environment where a secondary language is being spoken that I can understand.  The only time I've ever been in a non-English speaking area was during my trip to Quebec (a part of Canada where most people speak French) a couple of years ago, and that was long before I had the chance to learn French.

I work in an Airport and although I only speak English I can 'understand' alot of what people from other countries are saying when they talk in their language. I pick up on the words I need to understand and that seems to make the rest of what they say clear. I have always been very good with English, both written and spoken. Maths I am good at when it is relevant. I always speak in a precise way using full words like do not instead of don't. My hand writing is always clear at start but deteriorates because I think quicker than I can write.