This week in my learning project, I decided to give the app learning another try. I felt like last week I did not give it a fair chance, only looking at a few apps. Now this week, I browsed through lots of apps and selected a bunch and gave them a try. I found that I liked 2 the most and ended up bouncing between the 2 for the most part.
The first one was called ASL study that I mentioned last week. Their app had lots of categories and videos and images to learn from. They had a few free categories (F1), but again I was sad to see that every category from sports to education was locked and needed payment to access (F2). This app worked for the numbers, but did not have everything I was looking for, so I turned to another app.
Learning ASL was the second app I found most useful. They used gifs to show the signs, which is much better then just a photo. I liked that, it made it really easy to learn from. One thing was they did not have a lot of categories (F3), or even a lot of signs within the categories.
(F1) ASL Study: free categories (F2) ASL Study: Sports and down paid categories (F3) Learning ASL: few categories
Personally I found both apps harder to navigate because you had to go back and forth into the categories to get to a new word. You couldn’t just search a word on Learning ASL and learn it, but you could on ASL study. Although, even if you search a word, it did not mean you would learn it because some of those words fell under the paid categories. The apps did not have a whole lot of options or signs that were free. This is where I would get frustrated trying to find certain words and then not being able to learn it without paying. I would then move between apps and lose track of what I was looking for. Overall, until I can find an app that has a program for learning, like Duolingo has for verbal languages, I do not think I will be going back to learning this particular skill from apps.
I actually got very frustrated with using the apps and eventually turned back to YouTube. I found a great channel that I think does an awesome job and has so much variety in learning. ASL Meredith is the channel I have been using. She does a really great job, and I find it super easy to learn from her. Searching her channel, I found that she had mostly everything I needed!
Check out my video of this weeks learning: