Yes, no and maybe so…… all entailed in this weeks learning.

This week of my learning project I choose to focus on learning common words and simple phrases. I was actually surprised by how easy some of the terms were to learn. The main struggle I had this week was based around word order. In ASL when you sign you format the sentence in object, subject then verb OSV. I watched on video that described the difference between OSV and Signing as we see (SEE). The video really allowed me to understand the difference. In sign they tend to cut out certain words so saying “Sign I Learn” is shorter and easier to say in ASL then “I’m learning sign language”. From my experience with learning French in school I noticed that in the French language they also order the words differently then we do. Overall I would say that this weeks learning went much beyond just exploring the signs because I got to focus in on some of the structural aspects of ASL.

The first week of my learning project I heavily relied on apps as the main resource for my learning. Last week I used videos and a few images as my main resource for learning. This week I tired to find new types of resources to use for my learning. However I found the to be a struggle, since ASL is such a visual thing it is hard to learn it through text and even pictures at times. SO I ended up using a variety of websites and videos as my ASL teacher this week. The main website I used for my learning was Cudoo. Cudoo provided a text description of how to perform each sign and a video that demonstrated it. I liked that the website offered both a text and video explanation because it allowed me to practice my comprehension by reading the text and also my visual interpretation by viewing the video. The only downside to Cudoo was that it only covered 11 terms in total. After learning all the terms provided in Cudoo I decided to learn some other short sentences I found important by using YouTube videos. In this process I manged to find a YouTube channel that shows All demonstrations. The channel is called Sign Language Dictionary and it has various short videos that demonstrate how to perform different signs. There was a few main things I really liked about the sign language dictionary channel. First of I liked that it provided a break down of the sign and also used relations to make the signs easier to remember. Secondly I really liked that the idol where short and just covered one term because that made it easy to find the sign I was looking for a not waste a lot of time. Overall I would say my two resources this week were both very strong and I would definitely recommended both of them to anyone else learning ASL.

Concluding this week of the learning project and looking ahead at the coming weeks of learning I am starting to feel a bit stumped on new resource forms to try. That being said I decided to join a Facebook page called “American Sign Language for All”. I thought joining this page might help me find more resources to use for my learning in the coming weeks. going this group has also provided me with various insights and resources into the deaf and hard of hearing community which is a super amazing thing to be exposed to while learning ASL.

In week 4 of my learning project I am going to expand my learning and try to learn some larger sentences that will allow me to carry on a basic conversation in ASL. At this point I am not completely sure of the virtual resources I will be using next week but likely some videos and hopefully maybe another website. Thats all I have for today wish me luck on week 4 of learning!

Here is some bonus content of my learning. Between week 2 and week 3 I decided to add the learning of colours to my learning plan. I found learning the colours rather easy because I found one video called “Learning how to sign colours in ASL” that explained and demonstrated the signs clearly which made it easy to pick up on. Check out my learning in the video below.