Author: Carys Moffatt (Page 2 of 3)

As the weeks go on, finding new apps for my ASL learning journey becomes increasingly harder. I could download an app with little to no user-access and blog about how it’s a terrible app and not to download it or buy it when it’s demanded. However, the reason I’m learning ASL is for such an amazing purpose; making communication and equity a priority for any student who comes into my classroom. So, I scrolled on the app store for a good few minutes, passing apps that were two stars and cost money to download. Eventually, I came across some friendly-looking apps with pretty good reviews. With the little ‘ding’ of confirmation, I downloaded ASLingo.

ASLingo

ASLingo is quite similar to Lingvano, one of the apps I reviewed in a previous post. The app starts you off with lessons on Greetings. Once you complete the four mini-lessons, there is a small quiz/recap of the lesson, then you can move onto the next one. I loved this format because the greetings are some of the most-used signs in ASL. This is also a great learning path for me, as I love the structure of lessons and quizzes over trying to choose and figure all of it out on my own. I also appreciated these lessons because I could see a great amount of variation.

For example: “how.” In a previous post, I gave two variations of how, including it in a video. In ASLingo, they gave another variation, one that was similar, and in my opinion, easier. All you have to do is point your thumbs outwards and bring your hands from together to outward.

My favourite aspect of the app is the Journal section. In the journal, they have topics for advocacy and culture. On the side I’ve provided an example on the Understanding Deaf Culture journal. When you click on it, it gives you a few quick paragraphs of information on the topic, allowing the user to research and develop their ASL understanding more in-depth.

I compared this app to Lingvano because it was like a copy-paste: the colour scheme, the formatting, and access to dictionary, lesson recaps, etc. The apps are extremely similar in these regards, which made ASLingo a favourite fairly quickly. However, there is a downside. You only get a few days worth of a free trial. After that, you have to pay for most of the features, such as flashcards/recaps, lessons, etc., essentially only leaving the dictionary. As a beginner learning ASL, this app is a great format and source for ASL culture, however, due to the need of payment after only a few days, I would say Lingvano is a great alternative because of its accessibility without the need of payment, and similarity to ASLingo.

 What I Learned This Week

This week I decided to learn some introductory sentences! I introduced myself “Hi, my name is Carys,” “I have two cats named Theo and Alice,” and “I’m becoming an Auntie in June.” Below is my video showing how to do the signs!

Thank you for joining me this week with my learning project journey!

With all the ASL apps in my arsenal I’ve compiled a list of great resources for ASL beginners, and another list of not-so-great resources. This week, I decided to explore one of the original apps I downloaded; Pocket Sign.

Pocket Sign

Pocket Sign is a beginner ASL learning app with many lessons and resources to help with your learning. The resources include the ‘Study’ tab, where there are flashcards of all the signs you’ve learned through your lessons, a tab labelled ‘Sign Words’ to go to for a quick review and a ‘Sign Sentences’ tab where the app pieces together signs you’ve learned to start practicing conversations, and a ‘Camera Sign Practice’ where you use your camera to show the sign you’re demonstrating and the app corrects you.

The app also includes a quick reference tab for the alphabet, as well as your daily lessons and a dictionary. This week, I used the dictionary to begin learning conversational ASL, where I would search a full sentence and the app would break up each word and have a demonstrator show you each sign slowly. I loved this feature because it made my introduction to sentences very easy to navigate. Now that I have the basics, I figured I could slowly begin incorporating some of the harder signs into my daily life.

The only major con about this app is that you only have a two week free trial. Since I explored this app around a month ago, I was limited on what lessons I could try out. However, you are not limited on the dictionary, so even though this app is not completely free for an adequate learning style, I’ve decided to keep this app due to its usefulness in sentence structure.

So… What’s Going On?

Using Pocket Sign’s dictionary, I was able to look up full sentences and followed the demonstrators videos on how to speak full ASL sentences. For this week’s video, I wasn’t exactly sure on what to show. Sure, I could have just done an in-depth review of the app – which I did anyway – but I wanted to include something that I learned. I decided to do this by sharing a very small part of my life with you all.

Over the February reading week, I got my first ever surgery! For the past few years, I’ve been on a journey to transform my smile. I was born missing quite a few adult and baby teeth, which lead to my canine on the right side of my mouth to grow in beside my front teeth. This caused my smile to be lopsided and my mouth to be misshapen. For two years I wore braces and then my orthodontist re-positioned my canine to where it’s supposed to be, all for the purpose of my surgery.

I got dental implant surgery. What happened was , my surgical dentist went in and screwed a post a few centimeters long into my upper jaw bone, then attached an abutment (a small post that connects to the implant and hangs under my gum) which will eventually, after a few months of healing, hold the crown/my fake tooth so I can have my dream smile. In my following video, I explain a bit of my predicament, and showcase Pocket Sign and my learning for this week.

Thanks for joining me this week on my ASL learning journey!

When it comes to educational apps I want them to be easy and fun. If you look at the Duolingo app, it is one of the most-used language apps in the world.  If you look at the Duolingo Language Report, you’ll see that people all over the world turn to the app to learn a variety of languages, such as English, Spanish, or French. I love Duolingo, and even used it in high-school to learn French for class and some Ukrainian for my job. My only downside to the five star app; it does not offer ASL.

Although it seems normal for Duolingo to not offer ASL, as the app uses many audio aspects for their learning, it uses a lot of pictures and words, which many users can use for matching the word to the picture. In my opinion, it would be no issue for the app to create animations of hands performing the signs to teach the language.

Regardless of Duolingo not teaching ASL, I love the layout of the app and how intriguing it can be for any age group. This week, knowing Duolingo does not offer ASL lessons, I turned to another app; SignSchool. SignSchool is a free ASL teaching app that provides a variety of topics with lessons, games, a ‘sign of the day’ and a dictionary. When I first opened SignSchool it looked very professional. The app has a colour theme of green, which gave a school aesthetic, but other than that it seemed very plain.

I started with topics and went straight to the ‘Greetings’ since I already know the other two topics; numbers and colours. There were ten greetings that I was eager to learn. However, I came into a bit of trouble. The video was way too fast! Even with the option to slow down the video, it was still too quick and I had to repeat the video quite a few times to try to learn the new signs. Below the video, the app also shows a still-picture of what your hand is supposed to look like as you go about the sign. I found the pictures unnecessary because they showed the starting and ending position of the hand, but not the axis in which your hand should be. For some of the very fast signs, it only confused me more and it was very difficult for me to learn anything.

One part of the app that I did love was the ‘Games’ section where you could do a fingerspelling game. What this would do is show a series of alphabetical signs in a certain order, with the option to slow it down, and then you would be able to type in your answer. I thought this was very beneficial for staying sharp on the alphabet and practicing fingerspelling and recognizing fingerspelling.

Despite my downsides to this app, I will be keeping it to practice my fingerspelling. Other than that, I would not recommend a beginner downloading the app to try to start their journey in sign language. It has potential to be great for a more experienced signer.

Thanks for joining me this week guys! See you all on my next update!

Hey everyone! This week I was a little stumped on what to learn. When I first thought about learning ASL I knew I wanted to start with the basics like numbers and letters; but now that those are done I was wondering what category to do next. Well, instead of a category, I decided to learn some basic signs to open up a conversation! I did this with Lingvano.

Lingvano is a free ASL teaching app with in-app purchases. When you first open the app, it will ask you what dialect of sign language you want to learn (American, British, or Australian), then, it will ask why you want to learn and help you set a goal for how much you want to learn in a certain timeframe. So far, I’ve used it a couple times this week to broaden my vocabulary, and have been able to keep a dictionary of sorts through the app. It automatically keeps track of all the signs you learn and how accurately you’re able to learn them through the app’s lessons.

The lessons are quite fun and extremely easy. It will start you off with basic greetings and more frequently-used words. The lessons include a slow-down feature, so in the lessons or in the dictionary, if the video is signing a word too fast for your liking, there is a turtle icon in the corner that you can press to slow down the video. Another fun feature is that the app will show you variations of different world dialects, like British and Australian.

One thing I found quite interesting is that you can do any sign with your left or right hand. I always assumed that there were certain signs for each hand and that specific hand had to sign them, which was quite silly to think as a lot of people try to learn ASL through TikTok or other sites that reverse the video view which would be very hard to replicate. The only thing that is a general rule is that once you pick which hand you prefer to sign with (usually your dominant, so for me it would be my right), you stick with it and not flip-flop between your two sides.

I learned quite a few more things that are important to know when having a conversation in ASL. For starters, when asking a question, you should lower your eyebrows to indicate your question. Another thing I learned was how much more variation there is in sign language. For example, when signing the word ‘deaf,’ you can put your finger from your ear to your chin, or the reverse of your chin to your ear.

Overall, Lingvano is a fantastic app for learning conversational ASL, and will definitely stay downloaded on my phone after this project is over!

Thanks for joining me everyone!

Anyone else absolutely obsessed with TikTok? If you are, you’re not alone. I spend quite a lot of time on the app, often opening it right when I turn off my alarm to help me wake up in the mornings. It was only natural for me to run to the app when contemplating what to document my journey on this week.

Using TikTok made documenting my progress quite easy and fun. Last week, I recorded a video on my phone and uploaded it to YouTube, which got the point across fairly well, but was quite boring. I found with TikTok, I was able to include my references in the video as screenshots instead of putting them separately in my post. Another great part about using TikTok was being able to cut in between takes rather than having to remake the whole video if I made a mistake.

This far into my learning journey, I’m able to do the alphabet, sign my name, and sign out the letters to words quite accurately. This week, I focused on learning numbers, specifically, 1-20. Using ASL Bloom, I was able to learn these easily and practice everyday. This is the knowledge I used in my TikTok recording.

These numbers were very easy to learn but they had me questioning if there were variations like their are in the alphabet. Again, ASL variations can happen for a multitude of reasons, such as ASL signs evolving over time, regional variation (like slang or the different ways to say ‘to’),  and international influence from other sign languages. I went ahead and watched a few videos on ASL number counting and found quite a few variations.

Through ASL Bloom, they show you how to use the numbers at a beginner level, making it obvious how your hand is supposed to look at every point. This was noticeable with the number ‘three.’ In the app, your palm faces away from you, but in the video your palm faces toward you. Another variation I noticed was with the numbers 16-19, where the way you move your hand went from a horizontal sweep in the app to a vertical turn in the video. The video also showed alternatives on how to do 16-19 by adding together the ‘ten’ followed by the remainder of your number. ex) to do 16, you would first do the sign for ‘ten,’ then follow it up by the sign for ‘six.’

Finding out about all the variations for counting numbers made some things easier for me. Such as how ASL Bloom had me switching the face of my palm every few numbers, which would make me forget what exact fingers to use for the sign, but the video specified the easier way to do it and had the palm switching directions less. Learning about the variations has definitely helped me find my own ASL language, as everyone who learns ASL uses it differently. I am having a lot of fun learning this language and am very excited to be able to apply it in a classroom setting in the future!

See you guys next week for the update on my journey!

Anyone else know that song that goes ‘do, re, mi, A, B, C, 1 2 3?’ Well, that’s all I could think of this week as I was learning the ASL alphabet. I must have learned the ASL alphabet forever ago because some of the signs came naturally and I could guess most of them as I worked through an online video to help me learn sections with quizzes at the end.

Some of the signs were a bit more difficult to learn, and were admittedly the ones that I was never able to learn all those years ago when I tried to learn the alphabet for fun. But this video I watched really helped me with the differences on the letters, like how you put your thumb between your ring and pinky finger for ‘M’ because it has three points for the bottom of the letter, and how you move your thumb in by one to have two points for the letter ‘N.’ It even helped me learn ‘P,’ which I’d always found most difficult, but is really only an upside-sown ‘K.’

This week I also tried expanding my online sources by looking through apps on my phone. That’s when I came across ASL Bloom, a free app with in-app purchases to help you learn ASL. In the app some of the first lessons you’ll see are the alphabet, holidays, numbers, and family basics. There are almost forty different categories to learn signs for free, and you have the option to pay for flashcards and quizzes. I clicked on the alphabet category and got to working on all the signs. I noticed that one of the signs, ‘G,’ was different from any other video or picture I had come across. In sign language, many people have different ways of doing certain signs. I did some research on ASL variation and found out that there are a few main reasons why there is variation, including how ASL signs evolve over time, regional variation (like slang or the different ways to say ‘to’),  and international influence from other sign languages. With my ‘G’ sign, both ways are correct, and it is up to the user (myself, or other people) to decide which we want to use.

Learning the alphabet was a lot of fun, and my dorm-mates often make fun of me for going through the alphabet really fast during conversations. With the alphabet, any beginner can communicate by spelling out words before learning the specific sign for them. Now that I can do the ASL alphabet, I’ve decided to expand my knowledge to numbers. See you all next week for my progress!