-I know how to fingerspell and some simple signs like good, bad, name.
-I have my textbook (Learning American Sign Language, Humphries & Madden) and I’ve looked through it to get an idea of what we’ll work on.
-Class is once a week for 2.5 hrs, and I’m pretty sure its an immersion environment.
-I believe once a week there’s a voluntary conversation hour.
Questions:
-I know some Deaf individuals through my karate school, but I’m not sure if its ok to ask them questions from time to time. Its not like we’re good friends, they’re just people I say hi to. I wouldn’t want to impose.
-I found ASLpro.com for a visual dictionary. Any other suggestions?
I don’t think they would consider it an imposition once they learn that you are going to school to learn their language, so to speak. You already have martial arts in common with them; I’ll bet money that they would be glad to help you learn ASL.
I suppose. There are plenty of people at my karate school for whom English is a second language; they don’t act like I need to be their tutor, yaknow? But its true if they had a specific question I would happy to answer it as best I can.
As long as any other language, ie, “it depends.” How much practice you put in, your natural ability with languages, how well you mesh with your instructor, amount of time you can spend in immersion environments, are all factors in language aquisition.
My school has 6 levels plus “Conversational” so in their opinion it takes a minimum of 36 weeks continuous study to get to a level where you can have a free-moving conversation. I expect very few advance though the levels that fast.
Also what level of fluency do you wish to achieve? Interpreter? Native Speaker? or do you just want to be able to say “whassup bitches?” to friends? That makes a big difference. I speak Spanish well enough for most basic scenarios (can I have [noun], where is [noun], I like to [verb], how are you? good morning, etc) , that doesn’t mean I really speak Spanish at all.
Well, I don’t think anyone cares but here’s how my first class went.
It was a full class of about 14 people. The instructor is Deaf and had super high energy which was awesome. We are not allowed to speak but we can ask “what sign” and fingerspell it. if a concept was just too big for our vocab, he would sign it, then write it out on the whiteboard. Skill level in “level 1” class ranged from “used to know some but it was a long time ago and I forgot” to “never even fingerspelled the alphabet before.”
We fingerspelled; learned numbers 1-30; colors; pronouns and posessive pronouns; question words; family members with the concept of “male/female” using areas of the face; “school” words like student, teacher, book, page, review; words for a professions by combining [verb]+person; some types of feelings (happy, sad, tired), simple positives and negatives (good/bad, like/don’t like, know/don’t know); the name sign for NYC. We started to look at how facial expressions affect meaning in the difference between should, need, and must which are all the same sign using different facial expressions and intensiity of gesture. Same for nice, pure and clean. We conversed with each other in simple smalltalk exchanges.
Whew! My brain was super tired afterwards. I’m probably even forgetting some of what was covered. It was a lot.
I think I’d like to get a basic introduction to things like “Hello”, “Where is the restroom?”, and “I don’t sign”. That would be the point where I could determine whether I have any chance of getting any better. I think I might do better with signs than spoken and written languages, where I tend to get a disconnect between the written and spoken forms.
It’s funny that you bring this up right now. Just last week in the MMP we were talking about my ASL classes that I’m currently taking. Is your class mandatory and/or for a grade?
Mine is and I’m quite worried about it. I think I like the way mine is set up a little better because I go to class two days a week instead of one.
It sounds like our teachers have a bit of a different approach, though. We’ve covered fingerspelling and numbers and also introductions (my name is, etc.). We talked about animals (I’ll never forget PIG as I missed it on a test) and now we’ve just started with schools and stuff like that.
Oh, and my teacher is hearing, but she didn’t let us know until about the third week.
No. It’s a private ASL school that was recommended to me by a Deaf aquaintence. All they do is teach ASL and there are no grades. There might be some general evaluation towards the end of each session. Its for people who want to communicate – they don’t train interpreters or teachers or anything like that – and their focus is building up communication skills and getting people to dive in and try without fear of error. Phrases like “I don’t understand”…“please repeat” and “slower please” were put out there right away. (There is a local community college program that is well respected in producing certified interpreters, if someone should want to go that route).
We weren’t meant to memorize every single thing we were exposed to. A lot of it becomes passive vocabulary at first (signs you might recognize if there is some context but not remember well enough to use yourself). I enjoy the way this class is structured – I’d be bored just going through fingerspelling for 2 hours much less 2 weeks – but I can see on the flipside it could be overwhelming for some.
I’ve been teaching myself ASL a bit here and there. I don’t know anyone who is deaf so I don’t have any real experience with it, so definitely take advantage of the voluntary conversation hour.
I’ve found this site to be helpful:
Among many other things, there’s a fingerspelling practice tool there that will fingerspell out random words to you, and you have to type in what they are. It has several levels of difficulty (slow, fast, and deaf).
One thing I’ve found by poking around online is that people in classes sign slowly, where real deaf people sign really freaking fast. I can easily recognize signs from a tutorial I have just gone through, but recognizing any random sign from any random conversation is much more difficult. Having someone to practice with will really help that. Another thing I’ve found useful is to just search up signing videos on youtube and try to understand what they are saying. Some will be tutorials. Others will just be deaf people making their own video blogs. There are also songs that people sign the lyrics to, which is fun and, since you can hear the lyrics, you can much more easily associate the sign with the word. In many of these they kinda stylize the signing though, which is good. It helps to get different versions of signs. There is no one way to sign ASL. There are all kinds of personal and regional differences. Getting exposed to as many different versions as possible helps.
ETA: Watching someone sign left handed really threw me at first. Try to find videos of people signing left handed so you can get used to it.
There’s an online sign dictionary here. Generally, if you google “ASL sign <word>” you will find a link to the sign at this site somewhere in the top results.
I can tell by how much I’ve done that getting fluent in conversation is difficult and will take some time. I watch a show on TV called “Switched at Birth” where one of the main characters is deaf, and I can catch most of the signs that they use on that show. It’s interesting when the signs don’t quite match the words that they are saying. The show clearly seems to write the dialog first then have someone create the signing afterwards. The signs will often be very abbreviated versions of what is actually being said.
I envy you. I wish I had the time to take a class. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn.
Maybe yes, maybe no. ASL is not a sign language version of English. Facial expression and body posture add meanings and are considered part of the language. (Linguistically, ASL is in in the French Sign family, as is Russian Sign). So maybe there is more meaning there than you think. Or maybe there’s a low-rent interpreter!
Thanks for the link, I think I had found lifeprint.com once before but I “lost” it and ASLpro fingerspell quiz is not as good. However I think ASLpro’s visual dictionary is both larger and easier to use, and I think it has more colloquialisms.
Oh yeah, my teacher can sign a one-handed sign with his left and right hand simultaneously so that everyone can see it equally. Badass. If another teacher stops by with a question the speed of their signing is purely astonishing. I watched a video about ASL dialects and learned that New Yorkers sign faster than usual and even fluent ASLers from the midwest can find it hard to follow. I guess if you can make it here, you really can make it anywhere.
Are you sure there’s no “meetups” for sign practice anywhere you can reasonably drive to? I know for sure there social/conversation hours in Philly, Pittsburgh & South Jersey. You can search meetup.com by zip code. You sound very dedicated. I hope you get a chance to find some people to chat with!
“Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sacks is pretty interesting book about the history of deaf education, and ASL and how it came to be recognized as a complete grammatical language with a spatial form of grammar.
Yep, I’m far from an expert yet, but I’m far enough along to know very well that ASL has its own grammar and rules and that it is not just a direct translation from spoken English. Some of the shortcuts on the show are exactly that, but others seem to be them omitting entire parts of sentences just to get the scene to flow better from an acting point of view.
They mostly sign fairly slowly on the show, which helps for us newbies who are trying to pick up the language.
There may be. I just don’t have time for it right now, unfortunately. Maybe when things settle down a bit I’ll look for a meetup or maybe even take a class.
For me, ASL doesn’t work like the other languages I’ve tried to learn.
The others were all indo-european, spoken languages and to a certain extent, they worked like English. The structure of the language was kind of the same as English, so I could figure out what I wanted to say in English and then translate it to that language.
ASL was totally different. Because it is structured so differently and it is spatial, I had to figure out what I meant and then sign that. Using English as a starting point led to really bad signing.
My wife took ASL. Her tip: at one point, they were given a project to sign a song as the song played. They could pick whatever they wished. The smartest guy in the class picked “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, which is basically those four words over and over. Be that guy.
