ASL Check-In

This week I met up with a friend of mine who spent three years in uni­ver­si­ty study­ing Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. She lent me more books than I can car­ry and pro­vid­ed me with some tips and strate­gies to help me in my learn­ing jour­ney. I prac­ticed out what I have learned so far with her, and she offered to do week­ly video chats with me to keep practicing!

So far, I have mem­o­rized the alpha­bet as well as some com­mon words and phrases:

• Yes
• No
• What is your name?
• Please
• Thank you
• You’re wel­come
• Deaf
• Stu­dent
• The 3 W’s

I have been watch­ing Bill Vic­ar’s Youtube chan­nel a lot; I have found the way he struc­tures his videos to be extreme­ly help­ful. Hav­ing com­plete­ly audio-less instruc­tion­al videos def­i­nite­ly pre­sent­ed itself as a chal­lenge ini­tial­ly, but I actu­al­ly found it to be very ben­e­fi­cial. His videos will repeat a word or phrase mul­ti­ple times through­out the les­son, bounc­ing back and forth between dif­fer­ent top­ics. At the end of each video, I always find I have ful­ly absorbed the infor­ma­tion and can recall the words with ease. 

The oth­er resource I looked into this week was The ASL App. I found this resource espe­cial­ly use­ful because it can be down­loaded on your phone and tak­en with you any­where you go! The app offers more ser­vices in the paid ver­sion, but for now the free ver­sion offers enough for my cur­rent skill level!

Head­ing into next week, I have a few goals and strate­gies in mind. My friend made a com­ment that watch­ing movies or shows that fea­ture deaf char­ac­ters helped her pick up on how to prop­er­ly use ASL in con­ver­sa­tion, and gave me a cou­ple of rec­om­men­da­tions. I am going to start work­ing through the books and work­sheets she pro­vid­ed me, and explore more web­sites and apps to see if I can find more resources. Right now my focus is to find more resources to help me increase my vocabulary.