I wounder if it would be hard to learn American Sign Language? I speak english and also over the past couple years I also learned spanish and by now I can pretty much have a spanish conversation with someone who is from Mexico and can speak it fluently. I´m thinking if I knew sign language, that could be useful for comunicating either with deaf people more effectively or for comunicating with people who either can´t speak or can´t understand me well in niether english nor spanish but who may use sign language. I imagine the easy part about sign language is that you don´t have to worry about pronunciation, accent, or sounding just right for the other person to understand you clearly.
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It’s like anything else.
Apply yourself to the study in graduated modules and you’ll learn it.
I’ve taken it and if you work hard then its easy to learn. Their are a lot of signs but most of them make sense.
American Sign Language is much unlike any language you will have studied before. The grammar will seem strange and will take time to understand. Learning the signs themselves is pretty easy, and one way I’ve found to remember them is to literally interpret some of my favorite songs, and ‘sing a long’ with signs…since I remember lyrics to songs really easily it helps me to remember and keep all of the different signs straight. However, once you learn ASL it would be important to remember that when interpreting you can’t be so literal as you’ll probably wind up signing something completely different than you intended. I personally have never learned the grammar of ASL as my friend who is deaf understands both the English grammar and ASL grammar, so I can sign to her with the same structure as if I were speaking English, which is far easier in my opinion. However, several of my friends have taken courses so that they could more accurately express themselves with our friend and they have often said how difficult and strange the grammar is.
While you don’t have to worry about pronunciation and so forth…facial expressions can be very important with sign language, and you could accidently infer something completely different than perhaps want you intended by making an incorrect facial expression (though the concept would at least still get across if the signs were accurate).
Sign language has been a wonderful resource for me! I’ve been able to communicate with my friend who is deaf as I said before. I also figure skated for 13 years and during that time it was hard to converse with my mother through the plexi-glass boards, so we would communicate via sign language. Then a girl moved from Texas and started skating at our rink, and she was hard of hearing, and she really appreciated having a friend that she could talk to at the rink, and not have to be so isolated and unable to communicate with anyone. Also, there was a time that a woman came into the candy store that i work at which is in this big plaza, we’re at the end of it so most people have gone through all the shops before they get to us. This one woman was all by herself and it turns out she was deaf. When I realized that she was pointing at things and then showing me how many she wanted using her fingers, i signed ‘o-k’ as I bent down to retrieve them and when I stood up she was beaming! She must have gone through the entire plaza (and just about every day of her life) pointing at things and so forth, and was so excited to find someone who could sign.
I would highly recommend learning sign language; I am a linguistics major at UMass Amherst and sign language has always been one of my most favorite languages!
I am learning German SL now and you must do a course. This is not something you can just mess about with at home with the computer etc.
SL is very visual and demonstrative. You need to use every part of your body and also mouth the words. I like it because it is a break from grammar, pronunciation etc.
I took this in school and I really liked it, Some of the signs are very obvious others not so much. I would definitely recommend it though. If you go to aslpro.com you can see some of the signs. 🙂