I’ve been wanting to learn American Sign Language (ASL) for several years now — no real reason, just sounded like a fun challenge — and for this past Christmas, Susan enrolled me in an online ASL course. Discover Sign Language is an six-week/24 hour online course offered by Oklahoma City Community College with the following description: Gain confidence in your ability to sign with the Deaf community. This course immerses you in silence to help you gain an understanding of the perspective of the hearing impaired and uses videos to demonstrate not only how to make signs, but how to communicate with facial expression. My course was “instructor led,” which did not mean what I assumed it meant. Each week, two lessons were unlocked on the website. Lessons could be completed at any time within the duration of the course, and at no time was there any “real time” interaction with instructors or students. At the end of each lesson, a message board dedicated to that specific lesson opened for a finite period (two weeks?), where students were prompted to post a comment about the lesson and the instructor left responses like “good observation!” While I have no complaints about the format, I envisioned “instructor led” to mean I would be on Zoom, watching someone lecture in real time. Each lesson consisted of one or two sets of words, information and facts about the Deaf community, multiple practice exercises, an end of lesson quiz, and online links for additional learning. Each lesson’s words shared a theme (“letters”, “numbers”, “vehicles”, “colors”) and was accompanied by videos demonstrating the signs. This specific instructor subscribes to the theory that ASL is better learned without the accompaniment of English, and so the signing videos contain no audio or subtitles. The lack of sound was difficult to adjust to, but I had a fairly high retention rate throughout the course, so maybe it works. Equally as interesting as the signs themselves, I learned about Deaf culture (and why it’s capitalized), the Deaf President Now protest, the proper etiquette to follow when introducing yourself to a Deaf person, what CODA means, and many other things. I had no idea, for example, that only around 30% to 40% of English words can be understood through lip reading. Try watching a sitcom on mute and see how much you can pick up. It’s tough! I also did not know that were were so many variants of sign language. ASL, or American Sign Language, is its own language. It has its own syntax that is similar but not identical to English. For example in ASL, the question “How are you doing?” consists of two signs, “how” and “you”, presented as a question. SEE, or Signing Exact English, is a different system in which every single work in a traditional English sentence is signed. Somewhere in the middle is Pidgin Signed English (PSE), which appears to be a conglomerate of the two. In addition, did you know that British Sign Language (BSL) is so different from American Sign Language that people using ASL and BSL could not communicate? (France, Ireland, China, and other countries have their own sign language as well.) Throw in Black ASL, regional differences, slang, and multiple signs for the same word and it’s enough to make your head spin. The one time I tried to teach myself ASL via YouTube, I learned the alphabet and gave up pretty quickly after that. In ASL, I learned that “fingerspelling” is an integral part of the language. Signs don’t exist for most proper nouns or even things like specific shades of color, so fingerspelling is highly relied on. I’m sure I drove Susan crazy practicing my ASL by fingerspelling every license plate we passed on the road. Having completed all twelve lessons and mastering such phrases as “I drive a black motorcycle”, “My cat is orange”, and “I like cookies and milk”, I took my final exam Wednesday evening and passed, earning a 94.4% in the class. The final consisted of 40 multiple choice questions like “where would you hold your hand when making this specific sign,” and “which of these is an example of an iconic sign?” Some of the questions involved watching a video and interpreting a sentence. Of the 40 questions I missed two, one of which was a matter of semantics. Second languages tend to fade from memory if one doesn’t practice them regularly, so I’m going to seek out some virtual clubs to keep my skills sharp and learn even more. For now though, I’m pretty happy with my little achievement. Similar Posts:
Source: https://www.robohara.com/?p=13474