ASL: Beginning Signs

MY FIRST WEEK:

I decided to start by learning the alphabet. The alphabet is important when learning any language, especially sign language. If you don’t know the sign for something, you can just spell it out with letters. This makes learning the alphabet one of the most important steps in learning ASL. After getting that pretty much memorized (I still forget a few every once and a while), I decided to move to the question words. This is also important because if you know the question words, you will be able to ask basic questions about things by pointing to them. So for example, if I didn’t know what something was, I would ask what and then point to it. Next was the basic words that are used in everyday. After getting the hang of those I went to basic phrases. Now I obviously didn’t learn every basic phrase, but this is just the start. Something I never realized about ASL was how important facial expressions and body movements are. For example, when asking questions, it is important to lean in and scrunch your eyebrows to indicate a question.

This week I decided to use YouTube to start my basics. I feel like YouTube is the base source for when you are learning a new skill. I found a few videos and channels that were really good, but also some that gave me misinformation. So it is really important to check with other videos and websites to make sure you are learning the correct signs. YouTube is a great resource that gave me tons and tons of videos to watch and learn from. I myself posted a video of my learning on YouTube. I want to try to learn from different sources each week or at least bounce between a few each week to see which one fits the best. I find one thing that is missing with the YouTube learning is that there is a lot of videos for learning the signs but not for practicing and quizzing yourself. Most of the videos that quiz you have more than the basics and I got a little confused, but I might not have found the right video yet, and those will be useful for later on when I have a broader knowledge of ASL.