The Love of a Language
- Sep 13, 2020
- 2 min read
When I was in one my first couple years at community college I had taken an American Sign Language course and fell in LOVE with the language. I would say even after that one class I had become pretty fluent enough to sign and the Deaf community could understand. Since that class (probably 8 years ago), I had not practiced and forgot a lot of the language.
Let me just put this out there that ASL is NOT signed English. It's its OWN language with its own grammar.
ASL is actually a lot more like Spanish than it is English.
There was one day at work a few weeks ago we had a Deaf client come in with her cat. I was SO excited to finally speak with a Deaf person.
It was my first true interaction with the Deaf out in the community.
It saddened me that I had forgotten a lot of signs, like I had mentioned before, but for the most part she understood me. Interacting with this client reignited that love I had for this language and I was determined to become fluent. I had even rewatched the entire show of Switched at Birth after I met this client.
I had done a lot of research in trying to find the best site to learn without having to pay a whole lot since I'm already in college debt from Vet Tech school. I came across Bill Vicars on YouTube and his sessions are awesome!!
I do still plan on going back to the local college and taking just the ASL courses maybe in the next year or so. I don't know about you, but I can't learn a language like this all online. In person teaching is much better, for me anyways.
All of Bill's video classes are on his site and he also has a site just for fingerspelling practice.
This first book is a good workbook that takes you thru vocab and grammar.
This book teaches you basic signs you may use every day.
These are two good books to start and you can work your way up to more advanced books.
I encourage you to take the leap and learn something new while stupid COVID is giving us the time to do so. It doesn't have to be ASL or even a language, but try something new. I would love to hear what y'all decide to do!
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