Talking without… talking?

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I always looked at learning a language as some skill that seems really cool, but at the same time so daunting that I would not even get going. This hasn’t stopped me from trying, and the Duolingo app on my phone can attest to that (especially with the passive-aggressive “Where did you go Benton? We miss you” every 15 minutes when I’m not learning why the student rode a moose to school in Spanish).

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That all changed when I decided to go on a full-time, two-year service missionary trip for my church. I was sent to the Balkans, and after a whirlwind 9 weeks in a training centre in Utah, I was thrown into the deep end. Over the two years, I lived in Montenegro, Serbia, and Croatia, and discovered that learning a language (and two at that, since Serbian and Croatian are distinguishable enough to have separate status) was exhausting! It took so much time and energy, and for the first 6 months or so I’m not sure whether I was asking for extra lettuce on my street vendor burger or extra shoes. But even after learning, and becoming fluent, in two languages that are barely spoken outside of their native countries, I think the most important thing I learned was the process of how to learn a language, and the mental skill, time, and dedication it takes.

Visiting Plitvica Lakes, Croatia

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Or so I thought. Then I enrolled in Educational Technologies 300 at the University of Regina, where one of our assignments is to chronicle the journey of learning for a specific skill or topic. And in my multilingual mind, I thought “Hey, well maybe another language would be cool. Can’t be as hard as before, right?”. So here we are, and I’ve chosen to study and learn American Sign Language (ASL) for the next two months. My knowledge of ASL is pretty limited; I remember learning the alphabet in Kindergarten, and I’ve used signs to teach songs to kids at my church before. But since this is a course for a degree in Education, I figured that ASL would be applicable for any future students with speaking difficulties, or at the very least engaging my students (and given my hands something to do rather than move around awkwardly when I teach).

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My plan for the next two months is to start with the basics: the alphabet, subjects (I, you, we, us), and some of the most common words we use in English. I am currently working as an EA with a student who uses ASL occasionally, and I am hoping that this project enables me to better meet his needs too! I am hoping that by the end of this course that I will be able to hold a very bare-bones conversation in ASL. Ideally, the biggest success for me would be to keep learning ASL after this semester, and maybe even incorporate some of it in my internship this fall. If you want to stay updated on my progress, keep your eyes on this blog, or follow me on twitter by clicking the button below.

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