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

Posted byaslsign 2 Comments on I am interested in learning sign language. Would it be worthwhile to teach myself from a book?

There are no teaching services in my area that I take classes for or anything similar to that. I know that there are books for sale on learning signing, but how good are they?
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2 Comments

  1. We are lucky enough to go to a free class given at work.
    I heard that there are videos at the library that you can
    get. A book is not that great, the pictures are deceiving.
    Try the video-you can see the shape of the hand and
    that is important. Good luck.

  2. 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!

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