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.