Hi all! Sorry if the question is off topic. My question is related to medicine and education, so I took the risk of asking it here. I have moderate to severe hearing loss (68 decibels). I would like to start learning a foreign language. I speak my native language well, understand speech well at close range, and can watch videos. I studied in a regular school with hearing children. Then I studied at the university. Now I have decided to try to enter a university in Poland. But I’m afraid that I won’t be able to learn the language. Is it worth starting and is it possible to learn a language with moderate to severe hearing loss? Are there any teachers here who have experience teaching people with hearing loss? Is it possible? I have no problems with writing, grammar, reading, even pronunciation is good, but I have problems with listening. I will be very grateful for your answers. Thank you!
My hearing isn’t great either, yet I managed to learn several languages(to various degrees, I might add, I’m not necessarily fluent in all of them). And I can relate to a lot of what you’re describing, so I really can’t see a problem here.
I’m originally from Poland. I don’t live there, so I don’t think I can offer you any technical advice on universities there, but if you want to chat privately with me about it, fell free to PM me.
I don’t know what the education system is like in Poland, but in many countries, if you can read the language and are hard of hearing, you can use accommodations like captioning or speech to text software to catch what you miss. It would be worth checking out what laws in Poland cover the education of students with disabilities and what kind of materials professors would have to provide you. It might be hard to learn to speak well if you can’t hear the sounds, but this would affect you more socially than academically if you could read well. I think if you are determined, you could make it work, even if it meant recording some of the lectures to watch again with captioning.
- Hmmm, whaddya think, Marta? would this be an appropriate time to tell my “Regina” story?
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