I just finished my first ASL lesson with Kimmi Kraus on iTalki. Immediately it was clear she has been teaching ASL for years, as we spent the first 30 minutes of our lesson creating a collaborative lesson plan and organizing the structure of our future lessons which included making intentional space to talk about audism and the compounded oppression deaf women and people of color face. After establishing our plan Kimmi administered a fingerspelling assessment and a comprehension assesment to determine my current level of understanding, and I was surprised to find I did a better job than I thought even though I started both assessments confident because of all the self-study I had completed until this point. However, I found out very quickly that people can sign the same word or even the same letter, very differently. I had wrongly assumed that, because ASL was a visual language, it would be easier to understand, Kimmi explained that this was mistaken because the language has less 'input' than an auditory lanaguage. She also used this moment to explain deaf culture to me a bit more as well. I learned that the deaf community commincate through touch more than the hearing community which prioritizes 'personal space' a bit more. And, apparent there are other languages similar to ASL called SE (Signed English) and SEE (Signed Exact English) that borrow from ASL, but use pronouns and plurals. This is a large point of contention in the ASL community because oftentimes creators will tag their videas as ASL but unknowingly use SE or SEE which can be incredibly confusing for deaf people and to anyone trying to learn ASL.
When the actual lesson began, we started by practicing signing 'basic' vocab words like 'yes,' 'no,' 'understand,' etc. Kimmi repeated them twice and I copied her, and then I signed the words independently. I was again surprised by my ability to remember most of them. Next lesson we're planning on reviewing these signs again and then beginning ASL grammar. While I didn't have much active 'learning time' during this particular lesson, I found it incredibly helpful in terms of exploring deaf cultural norms and I was grateful for the amount of questions I got answered, answers that will hopefully allow me to learn the language more easily and with greater understanding.
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