I am interested in learning sign language. Would it be worthwhile to teach myself from a book?

Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to learn any language from a book. With ASL, it’s almost impossible, since it is a visual-spacial language. With German or English, you can at least learn to read that language if you learn it from a book, even if you couldn’t speak it well. However, with ASL there is no written language – their poetry and literature is done in live or recorded performances.

If you want to learn ASL, the best way is to take a class taught by a Deaf person – however, if you have to learn on your own, you should at least get an instructional text that includes lessons on DVD.

I took ASL in college and we used courses from a publishing company called Dawn Sign Press:

http://www.dawnsign.com/shopping/category.cfm?CatID=6

I personally spent hours watching and re-watching both the entire Signing Naturally Series and the “A Basic Course in American Sign Language” tapes, in addition to the in-person instruction from our Deaf and hearing teachers. Both of those series are available at the link I supplied. If you can only get one, I would go with the Signing Naturally series level 1 and work up from there.

Once you get the basics down, there are also a growing number of Deaf Vlogs (video blogs) around that you can use to brush up on real world ASL usage. One of the largest lists of them is here:

http://www.deafread.com/vlogs/

My favorite is Joey Bayer’s vlog, which you can subscribe to in iTunes: http://www.joeybaer.com/

Hope that helps – good luck!