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.

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.

I have decided to do my learning project on ASL, which is a visual language that employs gestures and expressions to communicate. My interest in ASL actually came from Tik Tok. I saw a girl making mini sign language lessons, and I thought how interesting it would be to be able to learn it. I have been wanting to take the time and learn ASL for a few months now, but never got around to it. I thought this project would be the perfect opportunity for me to learn. Also, I feel that ASL is a very useful skill to have, considering I could potentially be teaching people who use sign language. English is my first language, but I actually also took French throughout all of high school. I know a little of what it is like to learn another language, but leaning ASL will be a little different.

I have decided to do my learning project on ASL, which is a visual language that employs gestures and expressions to communicate. My interest in ASL actually came from Tik Tok. I saw a girl making mini sign language lessons, and I thought how interesting it would be to be able to learn it. I have been wanting to take the time and learn ASL for a few months now, but never got around to it. I thought this project would be the perfect opportunity for me to learn. Also, I feel that ASL is a very useful skill to have, considering I could potentially be teaching people who use sign language. English is my first language, but I actually also took French throughout all of high school. I know a little of what it is like to learn another language, but leaning ASL will be a little different.

My base for sign language is not super strong. I know how to spell my name, and how to sign a few words, but I am unsure if I am even signing them correctly. This knowledge mainly comes from performing Christmas concerts at my school. We would sing while wearing black clothes and white gloves. We would then turn on black lights and sign certain words from the songs, such as Christmas, all, hear, me, you, and other very simple words. I have never tried to put the words together to make sentences.

My Plan:

I have been looking for resources and it turns out there is so many! For one, YouTube is going to be my best friend on this project. There are so many people teaching sign language from that platform. I want to also be able to explore other resources aside from YouTube. For one, I have found a few apps that teach you ASL. I am compiling a list of resources and whenever I post about my progress I will be sure to include my resources so others can follow along on my journey. As well I will review which resources provide the best teaching and result.

I definitely want to start with the absolute basics: the alphabet, the numbers, and a few basic phrases such as “Hi, my name is Kara” and “how are you?” and other common phrases. Other possible topics include colours, sports, date, time, and directions. As a future math teacher I want to try to learn math phrases as well, like, add, subtract, multiply, divide, half, percent, etc.

GOAL:

My goal for this project is to be able to have basic conversations and possible be able to apply that to more complicated conversations. I also want to be able to express basic math concepts in sign language. There is so much I want to learn and trying to decide where to start is hard. My overall goal is to create a base knowledge of understanding of sign language. I think this plan will provide a good base to continue onto a more advanced knowledge of sign language.

Thanks for joining me on my journey learning ASL.

More on ASL right here! This site actually provides a few resources for learning ASL as well.