It has been over five years since I have learned a language “from scratch” and that was because of the middle school requirement. I had chosen French because Latin was not offered, and it was very difficult for me to progress my skills because I relied purely on memorization. Since I am now personally choosing to learn American Sign Language, I hope that I can be able to formulate sentences based on my understand of the meaning of the particular signs.
I am so excited this semester because I am starting to learn ASL! I have not had prior experience with learning this new language, so I am worried but enthusiastic to start this journey. Unfortunately, I still have not met my language partner, Reba, because there were some scheduling conflicts. We finally decided to start sessions on Monday, September 7th and will meet for an hour twice a week. Hopefully we can meet in person when the school transitions to the green phase, but for now, we are sticking with communicating through Zoom or FaceTime.
We discussed through email and for the first day, we wanted to get a chance to introduce ourselves so we could get to know one another. We also planned to learn just fingerspelling and basic signs the first day. Since ASL is still fairly new to the SDLAP studies, there are three students taking the course with Reba. Reba decided that it would be a great opportunity if all of us could have a session together once or twice a month. I am curious about how those sessions will be planned since the other students have had more experience with ASL. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to getting the chance to talk to other University of Richmond students in sign language.
Since I am also one of the Korean language partners this year, I have been thinking from the perspective of the instructor. I really haven’t thought about how it was like to teach a language. There are just so many different components such as the alphabet, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar structure, and so much more to even start understanding a language. Because I am aware of this, I am also aware of my limitations for this semester. I would absolutely love to be conversational in ASL, but I know that that goal will take multiple years of practice and experience. Therefore, my goal for this semester is to become more aware of Deaf culture, fingerspell at a moderate speed, and to understand basic signs. Furthermore, I would like to learn the grammatical structure ASL uses so that I can start developing simple sentences.
Another thing I am curious about is the multiple sign languages and if/how they are connected. In linguistics, there are cognates that languages will share. I learned a little bit of Korean Sign Language with my friends so that we could interpret a Korean song. Even though there is no universal sign language, I wonder if there are any similar signs that have the same origin.
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