My last few lessons with my language learnig partner emphasized the importance of "role-shifiting" in ASL, or the practice of adopting the persona of the persona ad physical demeanor of an individual during conversation. So, using the vocbularly I've obtained so far, I practiced retelling a conversation between a father and a son as well as a man and his friend. In retelling conversations like the latter, merely shifting my body from side to side was sufficient to detail what one man said to another. But in retelling conversations like the latter where there is a clear imbalance of power, I not only had to shift my body from side to side, but I had to emulate a father looking down at his son and a son looking up at his father. This was an interesting exercise that taught me how ASL leverages incredibly subtle shifts in posture and gaze that may go unnonticed in English to create deeper understanding and enhance storytelling, and has been the most fun aspect of ASL to learn for me.
As the voacbulary has become more complex, I've definitely become more frustrated as memorizing the language itself has alwats been the most difficult part of language learning for me even when learning Spanish and Japanese. Both my professors in each subject noted that I always fared during grammar practice than I did during vocabulary practice but I think the way my language learning partner has broken down the lessons and the way she has tied each vocabular word to the function of an English object has been incredibly helpful and I can't wait until I'm able to talk about my interests and passions completely in ASL.
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