More Conversational

Well, this week was just... this week. With spring break upon us my original goal was to sleep, eat, enjoy myself, and work hard on this project as well as my upcoming TED talk. But, with spring break comes procrastination and I feel somewhat short on this weeks learning. I may have wanted to learn too much originally, but nevertheless I did not exactly meet my goal even though I didn't really have one. Anyway, I decided to focus my energy this week on question words and common questions to build up the basic knowledge I gained last week. In order to figure out what I was going to pursue these seven days, I honesty just thought to myself when learning another language, what would I learn next? And it came to me: what would a language be without questions. So, I give you the spring break edition of my genius project (no drinking or profanity included).

What I learned:

• How
• What
• When
• Where
• Which
• Who 
• Why

My usual technique of watching multiple Youtube videos demonstrating the different phrases and words was again the most important and helpful step in my learning. I watched each video a few times, then tried to recall the different signs and what they mean on my own, and eventually I had the knowledge of some important question words and questions under my belt. Additionally, I thought of some situation in real life where the phrases and questions would come up, and I tried to form a conversation with myself just thinking on my feet and really learning to use all the signs that I know.

This week I also read from my sources like signingsavvy and lifeprint, and I learned multiple things about the sigs themselves and the grammar they utilize. First, I learned and noticed that these signs also have a logical meaning behind them. For example, when signing,"where", you move your pointer finger around in a circle with a questioning look on your face. Logically, when you are looking to see where something is, you would turn in circles and look around you. Also, the sign for, "question", is just drawing a question mark in the air. These things especially help me remember the specific signs and also to figure out some signs that I don't know. On lifeprint, I started to delve into the complication that is grammar. Considering that I dont even understand grammar in English, I only decided to read into ASL grammar a little. I learned that statements in ASL are formed in a very logical and straightforward manner. Like english, sentences are structured with a subject and predicate. But, once you get into things like the future, it is structured with things like, "My car, I wash week-past." It seems somewhat underdeveloped and childlike to structure a sentence like this in English, which is posing a problem for me, but I am starting to get the hang of it.

Again, I learned that American Sign Language, and any other type of sign language is incredibly difficult. Just starting to get into the grammar and structuring of sentences and questions is opening my mind to just how difficult it is for people to learn American Sign Language. Especially people who are born deaf, because they cannot just hear what their parents are saying and pick up on the language; they have to see the signs and connect them to some meaning and learn grammar as well as so many other things. This made me realize clearly that being born deaf must be more difficult than being born in any country speaking any language. Anyway, this is leading me to focusing more on the topic of grammar next week so that I can have proper conversations.

Next comes the TED talk, which I am doing on Friday. This gives me a decent amount of time to prepare so I need to make sure it is perfect and not only compares to the previous presentations but surpasses them. So far I am feeling very confident with what I have written so far. It was not my exact inspiration, but I remembered a story from this fall that has to do with one of my passions, sign language, and a deaf girl. Honestly, the first thing that I recalled when thinking about telling a story through my TED talk was this experience and I hadn't even thought about it until that moment but I realized how perfect that experience was to tell my story. In a way, this experience was subconsciously driving me towards this genius project and I think that is amazing. I will stop torturing you now, but overall I feel confident in the emotions and messages that I am sending through this TED talk. Although, I'm not exactly certain what images I will utilize, but I have time to figure that out. 

P.S.- I have gained a newfound interest in people making ASL versions of songs so here is one that I found very fun and well made. I also learned that, like a different language, ASL grammar is structured in its own, unique way, so things like lyrics cannot be directly translated.

Video Blog

Here is my video blog:

Video Blog from Jen Bob on Vimeo.

Link: http://vimeo.com/62120820

Common Phrases

      This week was more open-ended for me by far than the two previous weeks. But it was also by far the most important; so it was key that I learned the correct things in order to build on my knowledge. Now that I'm getting out of the ASL a toddler learns and into some real learning, I can see the reasoning behind the signs and, call me a nerd, but it is really interesting. There is logic behind signs like I don't know, thank you, or event the sign for where and even if I don't exactly know the sign I now feel confident that I can logically figure it out. All fluff aside, this was still a very difficult week. Not only did I have to learn the signs, I had to figure out exactly what signs I was going to learn based on their importance and their difficulty. But, once I knew what I was going to pursue, I could find many tutorials on Youtube as well as the sites that I have been using. Here is what I learned how to say:

• My name is __________
• Thank You/ You're Welcome
• Please
• Good, bad, and okay
• How are you?
• My last name is __________ 
• Where is the bathroom? (This is the most important one)
• I don't know/ I know

    The list may not seem like a lot, but ASL is a memorizing game, and the older you are when you learn it, the more difficult it is just like with a language. Sometimes I really do wish that I had learned two languages growing up or a language and ASL, because that would have given so many opportunities as a kid without the hassle I have now of learning it independently. I realized that if I do pursue ASL and learn it fluently, I will not only use it for a job opportunity, but I would love to teach it to my kids one day. If I do have any extra time during this project though, I would like to memorize important words such as colors or days of the week especially if I end up teaching ASL to children in the future.

    This week's learning had no organization whatsoever. Unlike the past two weeks, the things I was learning did not go together in a certain order, making it even harder for me to learn. First, I had to do my research to figure out what exactly I was going to learn this week. The most important source for my information this week was lifeprint.com. They have lessons set up for people wanting to learn ASL by themselves, exactly what I am doing. I used lessons 1 and 2 on this site to base my learning off of. These lessons included things like yes/no, question words, and even learning the history of American Sign Language. For example, I learned that a man named Thomas Gallaudet, with the help of a man named Laurent Clerc brought sign language from France to the United States in 1817 and developed ASL.

     Anyway, that website was a great help in starting the bulding blocks for my learning this week. From there, I searched for video tutorials on Youtube that helped to teach the most important and most common phrases that were reccomended by the lessons on lifeprint.com. I found a video of a sassy man teaching common sign language and a woman teaching the same basics. I compared them with eachother just to double check that they were teaching the correct information. Also, they taught some the sign language that is commonly used by people and not the formal signs, so now that I know the slang I will be able to communicate better with everyone. Overall, these videos were my lifeline for this week and I did not really use any other form of learning besides watching these videos multiple times and practicing on my own without them as well. Although, at the end I did take a small quiz on lifeprint.com to test my knowledge. It looked like this:

    

Here is video #1 & 2:

      To finish, I learned so much over the course of this week. I continued to figure out how difficult American Sign Language is and how it honestly just takes memorization and practice to learn. I attempted to practice it with one of the French exchange students becuase I felt more comfortable signing than actually speaking French. That interaction went well except for the fact that he had no idea what I was signing, but I gained a lot of confidence even with that tiny, embarassing interaction. I am glad that over the course of the next weeks I have left myself with a more open-ended task because there are a lot of components to learning common phrases and sayings in sign language and due to the fact that theya re the most important things in the language, I need time to practice. Next week I will be learning question words such as: Why, Who, When, Where, etc. As well as more common questions and hopefully answers. Wish me luck! 

Learning Numbers

         Surprisingly, learning American Sign Language numbers is much harder than learning numbers in any language, including japonese. You can't just put individual fingers up to indicate what number you are trying to say if the number is ,say, 67. Unless you have several extra hands, it just takes time, effort, memorization and practice to learn how to sign ASL numbers. This part of my learning was the most difficult so far, but it taught me many things about myself and also about all the hard work that deaf or hard-of-hearing people put into their everyday lives just to be able to communicate.

        There were so many things I learned this week that I feel the need to share and explain them all to you. First, I learned that sign language is so much more difficult than I initially thought, and I think harder than every other normal person thinks it is. I also learned that my project is going to take a lot of time and I have to devote myself to it and make time to practice and read every single day, because I do not know how difficult each goal is going to be to achieve. Third, I learned that you have to be concious of every single detail when you are signing. For example, if you are signing a quantity, the palm of your hand should face away from your body while you are signing the number, but if you are just signing a number, then the position of your hand varies depending on the number you are signing. Not only that, but when you are signing a number, the position your hand faces is changing practically every 10 numbers. Finally, I learned that I need to delve myself into this project more in order to completely perfect what I am learning.

     So, on to my experiences this cycle. The beginning of this week kicked off the start to the spring sport season, including track, which I am in. So it has been even more of a struggle to keep up with learning ASL, but I have gotten through it with only some exhaustion and a possible cold. Since my learning went so well last week, I decided to use similar techniques because memorizing the alphabet is similar to memorizing numbers. At first, I went on to my new favorite site, signingsavvy.com, and I read the basics on the numbers and general descriptions of what to do when signing specific numbers. The first time I read all the rules on signing numbers, I could not even think straight. I am not only expected to overcome my terrible hand-eye coordination by signing, but I also have to think while doing it? Nevertheless, once I watched a video tutorial on how to sign the numbers, most of my confusion was gone.

     The first three days were devoted solely to learning the numbers through the use of websites, readings, and videos on Youtube. The videos were the most useful source, because when learning to do anything by yourself, it is nearly impossible to just read about it. The first day I learned the numbers 1-20, the second day I learned the numbers 21-40, and the last day I learned the numbers 41-50. My initial goal was to learn numbers from 1 to 100, but I had to change that due to difficulty of the task and time constraints. Sign language, like many other languages, is based off of the first 20 numbers, and then builds off of that. So, I tried to focus more on memorizing the first 20 than anything else. Then, it was somewhat easier to learn the signs for 21-50 since I already knew the basics.

Random Number Generator

     The following days I spent doing almost exactly the same learning techniques as the previous week. First, I found a random number generator that gave me five columns of numbers from 1-50 and I just signed all of them at my own pace, and if I wanted to change the numbers I generated more. Then, I started siging every ingle number I saw. Numbers on math homework, numbers in science, numbers on my computer, the date (Which has rules for signing also), and just anything that I saw a number on. Like the previous time, this helped me with the memorization of the numbers and also helped me to think about ASL quickly; making it almost an instinct. Finally, I had people tell me random numbers from 1-50 and signed them. Or if I heard a number I would sign it off the top of my head. After doing all this, I felt completely comfortable with signing the numbers 1-50 in ASL.



Signing 1-30:

     

       

Blogs I'm Following

Week #1
Anne
O'Neil
Jenna K.

Week #2
Susan
Chloe
Sun

Week #3
Drew
Susan
Sun

Week #4
Anne
Jenna R.
Brianna M.