I have never imagined that the American Sign Language would fascinate me so much. Growing up in an urban Chinese neighborhood with an extremely small deaf community, I did not know about ASL until college. I gradually gained more exposure to ASL through a course I am taking this semester, LING 1101, where there were many examples of ASL in our textbook, especially in chapters of phonetics and phonology. To me, the concept of sign languages seemed very distinctive and fascinating, so I registered for this ASL seminar without any hesitation.

The two biggest takeaways I gained were ASL is different from English and ASL is remarkably fun to learn. First off, I would’ve imagined that ASL is very similar to English in terms of sentence structure and grammar. A sign language probably simply provides a rich signed vocabulary, and people would use it to construct sentences in the same way an English speaker does. However, in ASL, objects come before the 5 W’s (Who What When Where Why) in questions. Instead of asking “what’s your name,” we ask “your name what.” I thought that makes sense because an object might be the most important part of a sentence, so putting it first can facilitate understanding. And since I was told that ASL is closer to French Signed Language (FSL) than British Signed Language, I wonder if the sentence structure originates from FSL. And do people ask questions like this in French?

ASL is fun in that many words are expressed by gestures resembling real-world objects or actions. The one that I found to be particularly interesting was “animal science.” The word for “animal” is putting fists in from of chests and wiggle like chicken wings while “science” is like pouring chemicals from 2 beakers. Words like those are so intuitive and easy to learn that I can’t help appreciating the meticulous and ingenious efforts put into designing the language!

Approaching the end, we had a full meeting “break out session” to practice what we just learned. I was not quite able to introduce myself in ASL — names are spelled out in ASL and I couldn’t recall all the letters that make up my name! What I do remember, however, is asking whether “you’re my Uber driver,” which is literally “you my drive person,”  with the hope that one day I’ll be able to show off my ASL knowledge on a ride!