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. :)
