Vienna Waits for Me!

Last week I set a goal to learn how to interpret a song as I have seen online. I was inspired by this video of a daughter interpreting for her dad at a concert!

I set out this week starting to learn how to interpret Vienna by Billy Joel and boy was it challenging! I thought the song is relatively slow, so it would make it easier to sign along with, but I still couldn’t keep up. I ended up just making a video of the signs at my own pace, and will work on getting it up to speed in the future. Billy Joel is also known for storytelling, so after taking a closer look at the lyrics, I realized how challenging this is going to be. Not many things are repeated in this song, which makes it even more challenging.

I decided the best plan of attack was to section the song into smaller pieces and then spend each week focusing on a section. This week I conquered the beginning of the song. I created a google document with the lyrics to the song and set out to Google how to sign the words I did not know. This turned out to be many of the words. I learned 25 new signs this week! It took me probably 1-1.5 hours to search for all the words. I then created links in my document so I can go back to and revisit signs I might forget. My resources came from SigningSavvy or LifePrint, which are two new websites I had not used before. Another setback this week came after I made and edited the video the first time, to realize later that night that I was signing “Where” as “When”! Big facepalm on my part!

Lifeprint gave great visual examples and explained in text what was going on, although it didn’t have a search bar. SigningSavvy was great because it had a search bar, so once you are on the site, you can keep searching for more words. This site shows you videos of people doing the signs but has its downfalls. Without being a member, you see an ad before every video, and you can’t access a description of the sign.

Let me know what you think of the video below! Thanks for reading!