I always thought that the grammar of American Sign Language would be similar to English, but it is not. This makes it difficult to talk and sign at the same time. The sentences use different structures and ASL does not use articles.
To demonstrate: In English, a sentence would be, "I need to go to the store." In ASL, you would sign, "I store need go." The verb always goes at the end of the sentence, instead of the beginning, which is much more common in English. This is why you rarely see people actually talking when their signing. They may mouth one or two words, but you will rarely see someone say an entire sentence (unless it's very short), because the word they would be saying would not match the word they were signing.
I don't want to say that a reference grammar would be completely useless in this situation, but I don't think it would be as useful as it would be for other languages. For me personally, I think it would be more useful to just practice the grammar while signing, instead of having it written out. Because ASL is not a written language, I think it would be harder to remember the rules by just looking at them on a sheet of paper. It would be useful, but I do not think it would be the best way to remember the grammar rules.
The best way to figure out the grammar rules for ASL is to just sign as much as possible. The deaf typically have no problem correcting you and they will let you know when you have signed something incorrectly or in the wrong order. My language partner has told me most of what I need to know about grammar, but I'm sure there are rules that have not come up yet.
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