At the beginning of the semester we were told to pick a skill and learn it using technology. It could have been anything, but I narrowed it down to choosing ASL. Initially, I thought how hard can it be? It’s like learning French. I was very wrong. It was so much different.

For one, ASL is not a verbal language, which to me makes it much harder to remember the signs. In verbal languages, I can at least make connections to English words. In ASL this was much harder. There were a few that were like this, but trust me the signs are very different from what you think they are. One example, if you look back to Week 2, the number 3 still throws me off!

If you also looks back to my week working with colours on Tik Tok, you might be able to notice that the colours do not really relate to anything, so it was a lot harder to remember them, and I still have trouble.

Overall, I found learning a language online, harder than it would be in person. I have learned French in school, and one pro of being in person when learning is that you can converse with your classmates for practice. I was fortunate to have a friend who was also learning ASL, but it was very hard to find people to practice ASL with. Without consistent use and practice of the language, I find that I forget a lot of signs.

Despite all of the setbacks I think I learned a lot about ASL. Looking back, my goal was to be able to have basic conversations in ASL. I think I was able to achieve this goal (see video below). I wish I was able to have a few more conversation words for more complex conversations, but overall I am super happy with my progress.

I also wanted to look into being able to sign mathematical words like multiply, divide, add, subtract, and numbers. I was able to learn the numbers from 1-100, although I do have to look back fairly often to remind myself. I did however have a hard time finding math signs, so I focused more on my numbers than the other signs. I do want to continue and be able to tutor math using some ASL.

Resources

Now, let’s talk resources. Over the course of the semester, I used a number of different resources. These include YouTube, Tik Tok, many different apps, Quizlet, and searched photos. One resource that I wish I did use, but honestly never thought of, was websites and other blogs. I cannot believe I did not check out websites that could have been full of good information! I think as I continue to learn, I will have to check out the websites one of my classmates had been using. Also, we talk so much about collaboration in class, I am a little disappointed in myself for not checking out other ASL blogs (besides my classmates).

My Top 2 and Least Favorite

Overall, I liked using YouTube the best. It really fit my learning style. I liked to see the signs over and over again, in slow motion and rewind as much as possible. YouTube had all of these features, plus a amazing selection of youtubers you were sharing their ASL knowledge. Check out the channel I found most helpful here.

Coming in second place, I would say Tik Tok actually, which sort of surprised me. Some things I liked about Tik Tok was again the sheer number of people creating ASL content was way bigger than I expected. I also liked that I found people who were also learning just like me. The short length of the videos was a big pro for me. It made it easy to focus on a few signs at a time instead of 15 signs from one category. The only drawback to it was that if you missed something, you had to watch the whole video back over again. I guess that could be a positive too because you are getting lots of practice! You can take a looks at my Tik Tok post right here!

Taking the least favorite spot has got to be using apps. Now for learning any other language I know there are great apps like DuoLingo. Unfortunately, there has not been a great app made for specifically learning ASL, at least not one on google play store (not sure about the apple app store). All apps I tried were hard to navigate, had to pay for most of the signs, only had photos, and were just not ideal when learning the language. I think they would work best as a review tool or like a translation dictionary if you forgot a sign. To read more about learning from apps click here.

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Throughout my weeks I have posted a few videos of my progress. Here is a link to all my blog posts for my learning projects. Throughout the posts you will find a few videos showing my progress. The video below shows me and my classmate completing a goal of both of ours. That is being able to have basic conversations in ASL.

Check out my conversation as well as some other signs I have learned!

This week my classmate, Brandon, and I shared our knowledge of ASL. We also agreed for our last post we will include some sample conversations that we would be able to say in ASL. We are in the process of putting together all of our learned signs and making a script of conversations.

Sadly we will not be able to get together due to Covid-19, so we decided that we would zoom call and record our conversations using one of the tools given to us in class. It will be a little bit more of a challenge, but we will try to make the best of it! It has been so fun collaborating with eachother so far. It was cool to see the different approaches we both took to learning ASL.

Although our approaches were similar, we definitely did not learn in the same order!

As I prepare for my final presentation of my learning of sign language I am focusing on tuning the signs I know and fully memorizing them. I have taken up learning a few other signs of random words that I find myself using every day. Words like car, drive, groceries, class, and some names of classes. As well I tried to find some terms related to Covid-19 and the pandemic, such as self-isolating or getting tested. These are all terms that would be useful, especially given the situation we are in. If there is any other terms that are related to everyday or the pandemic that you think I should learn, leave a comment to help me out!

For me, I found that learning through YouTube to be the most beneficial. Tik Tok was also pretty beneficial, but if you miss something you have to play the video over again completely. Which I mean in a sense made you review it a lot. These were the 2 sources in which I used for the past weeks.

Trust me conversing in a new language is much harder than it looks. This week I wanted to test my knowledge and what I have learned. I looked at conversation videos between two people in ASL on YouTube. From there I would see how much I could make out in the conversation. Some of the videos I used had subtitles, but were still helpful in the review process.

This video was one of the first ones I used to review. They go over basic conversation signs and it helped me with the review. I learned these signs near the beginning of my semester so it was really nice to review them.

In addition to review I am working more on the basic conversation aspect of my goal. I want to be able to communicate, and as of right now I am having a lot of trouble with remembering the signs.

Review is easy to do through YouTube and through my notes, but what I am having trouble with is getting that practice in. How can I practice ASL if nobody arounds me uses it? Well, I have reached out to a fellow classmate in hopes of setting up zoom calls so we can practice. Hopefully we can both benefit from it.

This week was midterm week for me, so my ASL learning took a bit of a backseat. I was only able to learn a few phrases but did not get a lot of practice in. Next week I plan on creating either some Tik Toks or a YouTube video for some of my progress.

This week I focused on communication. For the most part, communication in sign language will be with someone who also uses sign language. Most likely, I would be communicating with someone who is fluent in ASL. I know I will have trouble understanding fast sign language or all of the signs someone does.

So, with this in mind, I have decided to spend this week and next learning signs to help with communication. Phrases such as “can you sign that again”, “can you sign that slower”, or “I don’t understand”.

I actually continued learning on Tik Tok. As soon as I started finding ASL videos and following the accounts, more and more ASL videos have been popping up all over my for you page. I found @eleanorgpotter who is also learning ASL and using Tik Tok to document her progress. I really liked her videos and learned from them this week. She is just like me, trying to learn phrases and words that I will be able to use to communicate. I think that is the reason I like learning from Tik Tok so much. There are people on the app who are on the same page as you and are trying to learn just like you.

Every since I started learning sign language, any time I went on Tik Tok, I would see at least one video about sign language. I actually found a few people who do lessons in ASL. I loved her videos and saved them for learning. I really liked the videos made by @taylor.jamiee. (This link may not load her page. If it has trouble please see the video link at the bottom of this paragraph and from there, click on her profile.) She is apart of the deaf community and shares her knowledge of sign language with her Tik Tok followers. For example she teaches the Alphabet in this video.

I decided to explore making Tik Toks by myself for the first time. It was an interesting process, actually a lot easier than making YouTube videos in my opinion. I made my own signing with Taylor’s audio from some of her lesson videos. I really liked using Tik Tok as a learning source. There were so many people there teaching so many different sayings and words in ASL. Taylor, whose lessons all had organized categories, had really helpful videos. I also liked some other profiles who would share random words in ASL. @kaylie.altman uses a random word generator and signs them for her followers, teaching them the signs along the way. These are not the only 2 users use teach sing language, but I enjoyed their content a lot. Another one I found was @cargo_shorts_dad. Now he is not deaf, nor does he teach a lot of sign language, but his daughter is deaf and has implants to help her hear. A lot of his videos are educating people on why he and his wife do certain things and how they do these things with and for their deaf daughter. I think it is important to understand more than just the language when learning ASL. This profile helps with that portion.

I wanted to be able to share these videos with you, so I put them all into one YouTube video showing them. Please enjoy.

This weeks learning for my sign language project was spent on finally learning the rest of the numbers from 1-100. I already knew the numbers from 1-20 from my previous weeks, but learning the rest is apart of my goal. I want to be able to do math using sign language and this will bring me one step closer to that. As soon as you know the basic numbers, the others are fairly easy. For example if you know the sign for 4 and 2 you also know the sign for 42 by combining them. There are some outliers that are sometimes tricky to remember, like 25. I am just learning, so I am nowhere near memorized for all the numbers, but I am practicing everyday to get there.

Last weeks, using apps was not as fun as I hoped. If you want to see the struggles I faced check out my other post that focused on using apps to learn. Because of the struggles with apps, I did not learn a lot in that week. So, I have decided to switch back to YouTube this week to catch up on my learning. I have mentioned this channel before, but my favourite person to learn from has to be ASLMeredith. She makes learning the signs super easy and fun. I actually used a few videos of hers to learn the numbers. She has a playlist that goes through the numbers. She goes through small amounts in each video, then she actually has a review video from 1-100.

The thing I really like about YouTube is that you can slow down the videos to see the signs slower. You can also quickly rewind and find exactly where you left off. There are so many more videos and channels that I have found, but I find Meredith’s videos to be the most helpful.

Next week I want to try another source for learning. I am thinking Tik Tok, but if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment!

This week was thanksgiving and a little break from classes. With that I got to show off a little bit of my learning to my family. It was so fun to show them, but, consequently, I did not learn many new signs this week. With the extra day off I became a bit lazy. I decided to only learn a few new sings including some more numbers. I thought this week would be a the perfect chance for a review. I have been focusing so much on learning new signs, and not so much on review, so this week was perfect for remembering and practicing everything I have learned so far. I thought making flashcards would be the best way to review.

Quizlet is a website for just that. You can find other people’s flashcard sets and even make your own. I thought it was a great place to keep track of the signs I have learned and I could add to it as I learn more. The only problem was that I could not import my own photos without paying for the premium version. I checked out a few other flashcard websites, but all seemed to have the same problem. I chose to use Quizlet because it was the easiest to use out of the sites I found. Also, you can search their stock photos and get lucky with them. So, some of my cards have stock photos from their database, but others do not. Instead I created a doc that contains photos and screenshots of the signs so when I am practicing and reviewing I can refer to the document for the answers.

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These are some screenshots of my Quizlet flashcard set. The first 2 show how some of them have stock photos and others I just wrote the term and definition as the same thing. When cards without the photos come up, I will use my document to check my answers.

Quizlet is very easy to use. An account is free and your can share and save your sets there. You can create new ones by just clicking the create button. Everywhere you go on Quizlet, the create and search buttons will always be on the top part.

When you start a new set you have to title it, and you can even give it a specified description. Then you can start adding terms and definitions. If you type in a term, it will also give you suggested definitions for the term, based on other users terms. You can also add photos in by clicking the image button on the right side of the definitions. From there if you want to pay you can upload your own images, but you can also search for stock ones using the search bar. (I searched ASL as an example).

You can always update the set and add new cards. Lastly, you can search for other people’s sets that might be close to yours. The ones that I have seen for ASL, are pretty good, but the really good ones again require a premium membership.

Overall, Quizlet can be used as a study tool. They have an option to learn the flashcards which is really cool. Looking at it, there are review options and distributed practice options for learning. There are also games to learn like matching games and you can create your own tests to quiz yourself. It has some really good ways to make the learning fun.

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.

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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:

This week was not as productive as last week, but I did make some progress on revision and learning the numbers from 1-10 and some other basics. This week I was hoping to know the numbers by heart from 1-20, but I am still working on the numbers from 11-20, so I am not quite ready to share my learning of those yet. As for the other basic words I learned, I started time and date. So I can now tell the time for the most part, but again a huge part of time is knowing the numbers, and I am not quite fluent in those yet. One thing about the numbers is they were a little different then what I expected. I am used to making my threes like photo 1, but the actual sign is photo 2. The reason for this is that if the number 3 would have been the way I though, it would have been pretty much the same as the number 6.

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This week I decided to try learning from an app. Now, I tried 3 different apps out and each had points that I liked and disliked.

The first app I tried was Master Sign Language. This app seemed really good. It had a good amount of categories to learn about from greetings to family to food. Unfortunately, I found that within these categories there was a very odd selection of phrases that could be learned. There was no generalization of phrases. For example, under the date and time section, the only example phrase for “I was born” was “I was born in 1911”. It just kind of made me not want to learn from it because it seemed not current. In addition, all of the phrases had picture versions of the signs, and not videos showing you how to do it. Overall, this app did not work for me. So, I moved onto the next app.

The next one I tried was The ASL App. This one was all videos which was really helpful, and the basic videos were great. It really helped me to review a lot of the signs I learned in the first week. Unfortunately, a lot of the content was not free. As I continued to search through the categories, I noticed that if I wanted to learn most of the categories, I would have to purchase the “pack”. Each pack is like a category. For example, the “more basic signs” pack had 72 videos I could watch, but I would have to purchase it. I believe it is $1.29 per pack, and with how many packs there were, it just wasn’t going to be worth it in the end. Overall, the free packs on this app helped me with the very basic review stuff and I think it is a great starting block for people just starting to learn ASL.

I decided to try out one more app. This app was called ASL Study. This one had videos for every little sign with lots of signs in each category. Out of the 13 categories, only 7 were not free, so it still gave just the basics, but it had a much bigger range than the other apps. I would have to say this one was by far my favourite. I could even slow down and speed up the videos according to my needs. I think I am going to try a few other apps as well for next week but continue to use this one for the time being as well.