A,B,C’s and 1,2,3’s (ASL Learning Project)

Following along with the TakeLessons ASL series on YouTube, this past week I have learned the alphabet, numbers, and started to learn colours!The alphabet and numbers came fairly easy to me but the colours I am needing to practice a bit more. The biggest challenge I have faced so far? Hand cramps. I expect that this will continue until I am able to strengthen the muscles in my hands and wrists.

Learning the numbers was interesting, I thought it would be very similar to how I would normally finger count. I found that there were many differences. in particular, I thought that the way you sign the numbers 11-20 to be a good way to continue in similar fashion to the numbers 1-10. And I never thought you would be able to sign 20 numbers using only one hand!

I’ve only spent two days working on colours. I thought I would have been able to learn them well for the video I was posting today since I picked up on numbers and letters quickly but that hasn’t been the case. This did not surprise me too much when I really thought about it, however. I have taken French classes and in each one I always came to a point in the class where the memorization and understanding of some words and concepts became tricky than the previous ones had been. All this means is that I will have to keep on practicing as I move forward in this learning project!

This week I shared my learning with some friends and family and received the question “is there only one kind of sign language?” many times. Since I am learning American Sign Language, I figured there must be other sign languages too! I decided that this is something I should look into while I continue to learn to sign. I found a couple of websites that I plan to go through over the next few days (“History of American Sign Language” Dawn Sign Press, “The History of Sign Language” GoReact, and “A Guide to the Different Types of Sign Language Around the World” Richard Brooks). I also came across another website, lifeprint.com  with 60 lessons on it. These next few days I plan to follow these lessons to see how they can improve my learning.

Until then, here is my progress so far!