What a semester!
I have always been interested in ASL because I wanted to communicate with more people and because I enjoyed the thought of communicating without words. Now that I’ve had one semester of learning ASL from the wonderful Reba, I am very satisfied with how much information I absorbed. Of course, I am still at a novice level and nowhere near fluent, but I do think I have come a long way since the beginning of September.
Since we did have our break during these two weeks, I wasn’t able to meet with Reba all four times. Instead, I reviewed some old recordings our lessons. This way, I wouldn’t lose too much of the vocabulary I tried so hard to remember and learn. Some things I did notice as I analyzed these videos were that I would overuse the words “uh huh” and “yes” throughout our lessons. Even though I did understand at that time, I feel that this made it difficult for me to interpret the situation when I watch the videos again. I wish I had narrated some parts of the lessons so that in the next year, I can watch and understand immediately, or I could show this to my family, and they could also learn right away. That being said, I guess I do have to realize that doing so would’ve been too difficult for me to understand and explain at the same time.
An activity I do very frequently whenever I remember and have time is just fingerspelling random terms I see. Whether it’s during lectures and I see a complex word on the slide or if I’m watching a show and I see a cool word in the subtitles, I will try to fingerspell it to myself as quickly as possible without making any mistakes. This is good practice since I am can use letters such as “q” and “x” which are not as common as “e” or “s”. Another practicing tool that Faith introduced to me is asl.ms. I haven’t been using it often, but I will make an effort to do so because it will help me find the correct word when I see someone fingerspell. I am still on the slow level, but I can sometimes get the medium level speed too!
For our last session, Reba and I did some more review and just practicing overall. Even though I did review by watching the videos, I still was very much out of practice and her signing seemed much faster than before. A new thing I learned was a short, mini introduction to ASL grammar. In English, we would say that “the cat and dog is asleep”, but in ASL, the words “the”, “and”, and “is” are not used. This was a challenge because when I sign, I still speak and directly sign my words. We didn’t dive deeply into sentence structures, but I hope to learn them in the near future. Although my official classes with Reba has ended, she welcomed me to email, text, or call her to check in and practice ASL with her!
Comments
Hi So Myung! I'm happy you had the chance to look over some of your videos and notice patterns of overusing filler words like yes and uh huh. I also like that you incorporate practice into your daily life and use ASL as a way of engaging with your class lectures. It sounds like you had a very productive semester and I hope you are able to continue applying what you have learned from this semester.