Cool sign language videos

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I'm on the last week of my American Sign Language mission! This has turned out to be one of my most interesting language projects yet! So interesting in fact, that I am pretty sure I'll come back to the States for another month (after I've tackled my fourth language this year) to continue my progress in it.

ASL feels especially expressive to me because it uses space, movement and facial expression alongside manual signs. So it's quickly becoming my favourite language!

Precisely as I had expected, many of the main challenges in this mission feel similar to learning a spoken language: the need for confidence to use the little you know as quickly as you can, challenges in finding the right people to use it with, getting over your own lazy excuses, and using extrapolation and social dynamics to enter conversations with fluent ASL users.

I've otherwise adapted various forms of my usual approach, including vocabulary study, to apply between conversations. I'll probably wait until the end of my second ASL experience to write in detail about how to apply these to sign language (i.e. “The Sign Language Hacking Guide” 😛 )

There are of course distinctive aspects that make ASL a fascinating language to learn, which I will elaborate on soon. Learning something so drastically different has reinforced my preference for a communicative approach, with emphasis on application.

This weekend I'll be working on making my main video to conclude this particular ASL mission; a fun project that was inspired by one of the videos below. With that in mind, I wanted to share some of my favourite online videos about or in ASL! Enjoy! 🙂

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

An ASL take on a pop song

This one was doing the viral-Youtube-video rounds a while back – it's a funny interpretation of a pop song by an ASL student:

Morse code sign language alphabet song

This is by far the most impressive video I've seen this year. Stu Jay, another polyglot who has guest posted on this blog and who also inspired one of my most popular posts, says that the idea for this video came to him in a dream. In this video he teaches a manual alphabet alongside Morse code, using very clever associations. The background music syncs to a catchy tune. Well worth a watch:

My Deaf Lady

Signing English words directly just doesn't work in ASL. I was initially tempted to just learn as many words as possible and sign each one, one-after-the-other, directly translated from English. But that's not how ASL operates. It's something I'll try to take into account when I do my next video (which I didn't in the initial videos I've made in ASL). Many people pointed out how trying to sign and speak at the same time was messing the whole thing up and I can see why now.

Along those lines, while at a Deaf coffee meetup here in Austin, we were shown this clever parody of “My Fair Lady”, about a sloppy ASL student who improves her signing.

There is no sound with this video. If captions don't appear automatically, use the “CC” control in the YouTube player.

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