Over the past week, I met with Reba once on Monday for an hour. We were planning on meeting on Thursday too, but there were some technical complications that made meeting that day difficult. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first meeting with Reba so much! Eli was also there to help interpret for me. Although he said that he was still learning, it was so encouraging to see how quickly he was able to sign with Reba. The first thing I learned was signing the alphabet. We went through each letter and said it out loud. I remember seeing some ASL alphabet posters around my elementary school, so I knew the signs for some of the letters such as c,e,l,m,n,o,y, but had forgotten most of them. The most difficult letter for me was k because I was unsure on how to orient my fingers at first. Afterwards, we introduced ourselves and whenever Reba asked a question, I would reply by fingerspelling what I wanted to say. I definitely made some errors such as signing h instead of g but as we kept spelling, I was able to catch my mistakes quicker. Next she told me the sign for cat and for each variation of the sign, she told me to guess which animal she was referring to. In you don’t count my first attempts, I did pretty well! She asked me what I wanted to learn so I thought a good introduction would be greetings and telling someone about the weather, so I’ll be learning those signs in the next meeting.
As we were going over yes and no, Reba told me the importance of facial expressions in ASL. When I talk, others can use the tone of my voice to determine how I’m saying something. For those in the Deaf community, facial expressions are sort of like their “tone”. If I am telling a funny story but my face is serious, my signs and expressions contradict one another and make it more difficult for people to understand me. I have a tendency to just smile all the time, so I was saying “no” with a smile on my face, but now I know that I need my expressions to match my signs.
Since I am just beginning to learn ASL, I was trying to catch some signs as Reba and Eli were communicating. It was much faster than I was used to, but I caught the sign for “slow down” and “see” for when Reba was going too fast or when her hands were out of the camera frame. I also learned that the sign for “student” was actually a combination of the sign “to learn” and “person”. I’m also very curious about how the grammatical structure is for ASL because so far, it seems exactly like the structure for English.
In the future, I want to use Zoom instead of FaceTime so that I can record our lessons. I found it a little difficult to recall particular signs because I couldn’t necessarily draw each sign I learned. I did however pass Eli this week and we greeted each other, and he helped me remember some signs!
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