Helen Keller Learning To Speak

how did helen keller

Learning to readand write

Annie Sullivan arrived at Helen Keller's business firm on March five, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as 'my soul'south birthday'.

Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate past spelling words into her hand, kickoff with "d-o-50-50" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present.

Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did non understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it.

When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the give-and-take for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. But soon she began imitating Sullivan's paw gestures. "I did not know that I was spelling a word or fifty-fifty that words existed," Keller remembered. "I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation."

Keller's breakthrough in communication came the adjacent month when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her mitt, while running absurd water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "h2o".

Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment: "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. All of a sudden I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that west-a-t-eastward-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living give-and-take awakened my soul, gave it light, promise, set up information technology gratuitous!"

Keller then about exhausted Sullivan, demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

Learning to speak

When Helen was ten years old, she came to know about a girl in Norway, deafened and blind like her, but who had been taught to speak. This fired her passion to speak similar any other ordinary human being being.

Anne took her to Sarah Fuller, and then the principal of Horace Mann School for Deafened. Sarah would place Helen's hand on her lips, natural language, face and throat while she was talking. Helen would feel the positions of Sarah'due south lips and tongue and vibrations of her throat. She would identify her other hand on her own lips and tongue and would try to imitate the positions of Sarah's lips and natural language.

This was exhausting but she uttered her first sentence"It'due south also warm here"within a few days. Though she learned to speak, she was never able speak with clarity.

Beneath are some excerpts from her autobiographyThe Story of My Life where she describes how she learned the abstruse concepts.

I retrieve the morning that I first asked the significant of the word, "love." This was earlier I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: just at that fourth dimension I did non like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my paw, "I love Helen."

"What is dearest?" I asked.

She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my middle, whose beats I was witting of for the first fourth dimension. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not and then understand anything unless I touched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?"

"No," said my teacher.

Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on u.s..

"Is this non dear?" I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. "Is this not love?"

It seemed to me that there could be nothing more than beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. Only Miss Sullivan shook her caput, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I idea information technology strange that my teacher could not prove me love.

A mean solar day or ii afterward I was stringing beads of unlike sizes in symmetrical groups—2 large beads, 3 small ones, and and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again and over again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to retrieve how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided accent, "Think."

In a flash I knew that the word was the proper noun of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract thought.

For a long time I was still—I was not thinking of the beads in my lap, just trying to find a meaning for "love" in the lite of this new idea. The sun had been under a deject all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.

Again I asked my teacher, "Is this not love?"

"Love is something similar the clouds that were in the heaven earlier the sun came out," she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at that time I could non have understood, she explained: "Y'all cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it afterwards a hot day. You cannot touch love either; merely y'all experience the sweet that it pours into everything. Without love you lot would not exist happy or want to play."

The cute truth flare-up upon my mind—I felt that at that place were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.

From the commencement of my education Miss Sullivan made it a practise to speak to me as she would speak to whatever hearing child; the only difference was that she spelled the sentences into my hand instead of speaking them. If I did not know the words and idioms necessary to express my thoughts she supplied them, fifty-fifty suggesting conversation when I was unable to keep up my terminate of the dialogue.

This process was continued for several years; for the deafened child does non learn in a month, or even in two or three years, the numberless idioms and expressions used in the simplest daily intercourse. The little hearing child learns these from constant repetition and imitation. The chat he hears in his home stimulates his heed and suggests topics and calls along the spontaneous expression of his own thoughts.

This natural commutation of ideas is denied to the deaf child. My teacher, realizing this, determined to supply the kinds of stimulus I lacked. This she did by repeating to me as far as possible, verbatim, what she heard, and past showing me how I could take part in the conversation. But it was a long time before I ventured to take the initiative, and still longer earlier I could find something advisable to say at the right time.