My new ASL class

Daft said:
During class we had a vocubulary building exercise in which everyone was to show a style with a particular hand shape and then fingerspell the meaning of the sign. On this evening, the handshape was the letter S. So his sister made two 2-handshapes and pulled one hand forward and one hand backward. She then fingerspelled S O. Her brother looked at her and was like "what the heck was that that?" She again fingerspelled S O, and he replied it looked more like "rip" or "tear" and it would be much faster just to fingerspell it. The entire class simply broke up with laughter. We all knew they weren't having any sort of serious disagreement. It was fun seeing sibling teasing in ASL.
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That's pretty common, actually. I've gone through 5 college level ASL classes, and there have been times when what we learned in one class was contradicted by a later class, even in cases when both instructors were native Deaf. Of course they would always insist that their way was "right". There were even times when instructors would contradict themselves! For instance, they would carefully teach a sign one way, and then later in the class when they used it without thinking, it'd be different.

So, yeah, being flexible is definitely a must if you want to learn the language!
 
My classes are going well. The teacher is deaf and there is one other student besides myself. I do what the teacher says. She is a member of the local deaf community and she knows how people communicate here. Lots of practice!
 
sallylou said:
I do what the teacher says. She is a member of the local deaf community and she knows how people communicate here.
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The most important thing right now is to match your teacher since she's the one who'll be giving you your grade. But don't be surprised if you find other instructors and even members of the Deaf community contradicting her.
 
Mountain Man, my class is at the deaf center of a deaf church. No grade. Fortunately, the people at the deaf center are very patient with me. :D
 
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