Help With ASL

[Godsgirl101]

I am a hearing girl who is trying to learn asl. Its my dream to teach deaf kids someday. My question is: Is the langage very hard to learn?

 

[Vance]

First... Welcome to AD! Enjoy your stay!

About your question, not really. It is largely depend on your eagerness and motivation to learn the ASL. If you somehow have the access to ASL courses or deafies around near your area who is/are open enough to teach you the ASL and such. You shouldn't have any problem.

In fact, when compare to different languages, ASL is the most easier to learn.

 

[Margie]

Its just takes practice.

Hi Godsgirl101,
Its not really hard, but its takes time to learn.
All you need to do is practice when ever you can.
The best way to learn ASL is from the deaf.
I've known it for 30 yrs,also I'm an interpreter.
If theres a deaf oragnization where you live, check it out.
See if they have any events where you can meet the deaf.
Good luck!
Margie
Dir.of Communcation Services
OCDAC

 

[jejones3141]

I am a hearing girl who is trying to learn asl. Its my dream to teach deaf kids someday. My question is: Is the langage very hard to learn?

Well... yes and no. I can certainly say it's easy to forget if you don't make a point of using it! (This is the voice of sad experience.)

Aside from languages designed to be easy, like Esperanto, "easy" effectively means "like a language I already know." Signed languages are very different in some ways from spoken languages, because you aren't confined to a linear stream of symbols. English has large classes of words that mean almost the same thing; we use them to communicate shades of meaning. ASL has other ways to do that.

Just as spoken languages have homonyms and words that sound almost the same, ASL has signs that are identical (is that a 9 or an F? it depends on context, but what if you're signing numbers in base 16, which uses both 9 and F?) and similar (as a woman found out who signed "he's my second hamburger" rather than "he's my second husband"). It takes practice to remember signs and keep them straight. (I managed to come off as an Oedipus wannabe once by confusing "woman" and "mother"...sigh. At least my teacher was amused.)

It's important to try to think in terms of the language you're trying to learn, be it spoken, signed, or even a programming language.

Another thing that makes ASL harder to learn is that it has no written form. (Linguists have designed ways to notate signing, but they're not used generally; a woman has come up with a system called Signwriting, but I don't know whether it's widely used.) If you are learning Spanish or French or most other spoken languages, there are huge bodies of grammatical utterances that are written down that you can study at your leisure, any time of day or night. In doing so, you are using a "divide and conquer" strategy--you can take as long as you want to ponder a sentence and look up words you don't understand, and you have it divided up into words for you, so you can concentrate on grammar. You don't have that luxury with ASL.