Sign Language Class!
Jun. 23rd, 2009 06:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosebeeFirst class was last night. The teacher is a coda (child of deaf adults), and her first langugae was ASL with English being her second language. She's big on having her students learn & get used to reading and doing fingerspelling. And she really emphasized the need to loosen up a bit and remember to use your face & body language when signing, as what you do there can really change the meaning of a sign.
I have a big page of words to practice fingerspelling, in groups to emphasize/repeat certain letter combinations (so the brain gets used to seeing syllables/letter combinations and not just individual letters one at a time). Plus there's a vocab list of various signs.
While I learned a bit of sign in high school, it was all a form called Signed English, and not the official American Sign Language that is standard for the Deaf community and what this class is teaching. There's a LOT of signs that I learned as initialized versions that I need to unlearn. And I'm sure that there's a LOT of other things I'm going to need to unlearn/re-learn.
For the curious, my vocab list for this first week is:
how, you/me, what, name, from, where, nice, meet, my/mine & you/yours, friend, teacher, student, mother, father, daughter, son, grandmother, grandfather, understand, & fine. Aslpro.com is a good site that has nice full color videos of hundreds of different signs. The book the class uses is good, but color videos are a welcome compliment to a handdrawn diagram with descriptions of hand placement & movement.
Some of these I'm already familiar with, some much more than others. My goal is to practice enough this week that they all become second nature. We'll see how I do. :) My goal/hope for the class is that MrB & I both learn enough sign so that when we're out at a noisy place and my brain can't tune out the background noise to hear what he's saying we'll be able to switch to ASL and I'll be able to understand him!
Also - Happy Anniversary to MrB & I!!! :D It's *really* difficult to believe it's been two whole years already since we got married. With MrB taking two real summer term classes (in addition to the ASL class with me), we didn't have the time or the money to go somewhere like we did last year. So we're just going to go out to dinner tonight. :)
I have a big page of words to practice fingerspelling, in groups to emphasize/repeat certain letter combinations (so the brain gets used to seeing syllables/letter combinations and not just individual letters one at a time). Plus there's a vocab list of various signs.
While I learned a bit of sign in high school, it was all a form called Signed English, and not the official American Sign Language that is standard for the Deaf community and what this class is teaching. There's a LOT of signs that I learned as initialized versions that I need to unlearn. And I'm sure that there's a LOT of other things I'm going to need to unlearn/re-learn.
For the curious, my vocab list for this first week is:
how, you/me, what, name, from, where, nice, meet, my/mine & you/yours, friend, teacher, student, mother, father, daughter, son, grandmother, grandfather, understand, & fine. Aslpro.com is a good site that has nice full color videos of hundreds of different signs. The book the class uses is good, but color videos are a welcome compliment to a handdrawn diagram with descriptions of hand placement & movement.
Some of these I'm already familiar with, some much more than others. My goal is to practice enough this week that they all become second nature. We'll see how I do. :) My goal/hope for the class is that MrB & I both learn enough sign so that when we're out at a noisy place and my brain can't tune out the background noise to hear what he's saying we'll be able to switch to ASL and I'll be able to understand him!
Also - Happy Anniversary to MrB & I!!! :D It's *really* difficult to believe it's been two whole years already since we got married. With MrB taking two real summer term classes (in addition to the ASL class with me), we didn't have the time or the money to go somewhere like we did last year. So we're just going to go out to dinner tonight. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-06-23 05:54 pm (UTC)Chris took ASL 2 quarters in... 1980, maybe? I don't remember much of it, though -- but I do remember what your teacher was saying, that it's a whole body language. And I remember that signed english. ASL is really its own language, with its own beauty and form and function.
One thing I remember her finding out that is true for me, too -- when I try to focus on remember ASL, I have trouble speaking. I think it must use different parts of the brain, and maybe the trouble is from my brain having so much dysfunction that the parts can't communicate well? But even thinking about it, I can *type* and make thoughts, fine, but when I test speaking something, I stumble! Or maybe it's just weird psych stuff, I really have no idea. I think I'm going to try checking out aslpro.com!
One of my friends used signs with her daughter when her daughter was too small to be verbal -- it's very cool to me that Mirian could communicate with signs before seh could speak, so she had a lot less frustration than a lot of babies, I think.
Happy anniversary to you adn MrB!!! May you have many more happy years together!
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 12:07 am (UTC)I think there are different places in the brain for auditory language and visual language.
And yes, I've always thought it was really cool that young babies can control their hands to communicate via sign quite a bit earlier than they can via speech.