One of my oldest friends is hard of hearing; it doesn’t tend to get in the way of her daily life, because she’s been developing her lip reading for decades, but the pandemic has presented her with new challenges. She’s in her freshman year of college this semester, and with everybody wearing masks, she’s having trouble understanding their words. She’s always known minimal sign language, but has recently decided to accelerate her studies due to the pandemic. I wanted to try and learn alongside her, which is a large part of why I signed up for this week’s sign language seminar.

The seminar was very helpful. I appreciated having experts in ASL to ask questions, because neither me nor my friend know the fundamentals of the language. I was able to ask a question I’ve been wondering for a while: can you speak English alongside ASL? My friend communicates in English every day, but it’s helpful if we’re speaking quickly in public to show the ASL sign alongside the word. If I’m asking my friend whether she’d like to head to the book store or music store, I can ask that easily through signing book and music in different directions.

As it turns out, ASL has different syntax from English in many cases. As an example, the word for driver is generally expressed by signing drive and person in quick succession — and this differs from English, which can make it difficult to speak fluently in both at the same time. This wasn’t something I’d realized, so I appreciated the answer I got from the seminar! ASL is its own language, with its own grammar rules. So if my friend and I would like to modify it for ourselves, we can, but this wouldn’t be ASL as it’s traditionally used.

This seminar, Signing On: An Introduction to American Sign Language, was a fun and informative that taught me a valuable skill in a inviting and easy way. Before taking this seminar, I knew a few words in sign language like “thank you” and “more” and a few letters that I had picked up from a class my family took many years ago, so I essentially knew nothing. This seminar taught us a lot of new key phrases like the alphabet, how to introduce ourselves, different majors, and some essential questions. I really enjoyed learning more about sign language and feeling a little more confident in a new skill. Most new languages can be very challenging, but I feel that ASL is easier to learn because a lot of the signs are more or less intuitive in acting out the motion or objects for words you would like to convey. Probably the hardest parts of learning sign language are remembering all of the slight specific differences between gestures and utilizing your face and emotions to express the correct word or phrase, and also how the sentence structure in ASL is switched from English sentence structure. Nonetheless, I thought this was a great class and is a great skill to have. Being a hearing person, a lot of the information I take and how I communicate with occurs through sound and I do not often think about people that are hard of hearing and how they navigate the world in a completely different way. After learning some sign language, I am thinking more about this and I am happy that I am slightly more able to be empathetic to this community and communicate with them through speech a little better than I could before.

I learned a little bit of sign language prior to this workshop and really enjoyed the way this workshop was ran. I was really interested in how complex sign language is in the sense that the way people sign depends on location and how there are shorter ways to sign words and phrases. The way people sign in other countries are different, making sign language not only a single language but also a language that has multiple languages. I would definitely be interested to learn more and continue practicing.

The sign language workshop was incredible. We logged on and started with the basics. I already knew a couple of basic signs and the alphabet, but this was a great refresher. We then moved into more advanced language signs, including our majors. I am hearing impaired and remember taking sign language classes as a kid. Although I deal with my impairment well, it felt really empowering taking a sign language class. I also had a lot of fun and want to learn sign language fluently. When doing sign language, the emphasis on emotion is really important. Using my hands and face to express myself during the workshop is so different from when I am just talking in my normal day to day life. It really makes you think more about what you want to say so someone else when you are using sign language.  I really hope to get more involved with CUDAP because it seems like an awesome program and community. 

I attended the seminar on American Sign Language. I enjoyed learning the language itself, and I had the realization that language is more general a notion than one would typically imagine. I really like learning new languages, but when I think of language in that context I think of French, Japanese, Chinese, German–spoken languages with strong associated cultures and histories. Of course, ASL has its own culture and history, but I think it is very distinct from spoken language in an interesting way–partially because it is a language that evolved from, one might say, the lack of language, and also because it is “spoken” in a completely different way.

I think it is particularly interesting how some ASL words are formed by compounding certain hand shapes with different movements–for example, chemistry is a combination of the letter “C” with the hand movements of “science”. There are other modulations like this that made me think: how many fundamental elements do you need to generate an entire language? I’d imagine that the basic forms you need are descriptives, like nouns, and then modifiers that can relate the objects to other things, for example auxiliaries like “is” and “have”, and action words like verbs, but what different forms can these elements take? And how few do you need so that all other elements can be generated from that fundamental set? I guess these are the questions asked by linguistics majors and people who write programming languages.

Back home, my older sister is taking American Sign Language classes as a language requirement for graduation. When she found out she would need this extra class before she could graduate, she was annoyed to say the least, and eager to get the credits over with. However, since she started her first ASL class last semester, she couldn’t be happier with the opportunity to have gotten to take the class. She would come back from it every week and share new signs she learned during our dinner table conversations, making me interested in learning more about the language as well. Since languages have always been intriguing to me, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to learn some of the basics of ASL. Having grown up bilingual, I’ve been exposed to the different mannerisms and cultures associated with the countries of the languages I speak. Being able to speak two languages allows me to connect with so many more people, so it’s been especially important to me to familiarize myself with the basic introductory vocabulary of any new language I come across. Especially living in the U.S., where our population is truly a melting pot of cultures with various languages, being able to simply say hi in another person’s native language creates a connection between two once distant individuals. It also allows for a sense of inclusion and respect. During one of my previous volunteer jobs working at the front desk directory at a hospital, being able to provide basic instructions in the native language of some of the visitors I believed gave them a sense of comfort and trust in the hospital to take care of them and their loved ones. In addition, having had the opportunity to volunteer in an adult day care center has further shown me how important languages such as ASL are in creating meaningful connections. I really wished I knew some basic signs back when I volunteered at the center in order to communicate with some of the members, but having this knowledge now is something I will forever value and make sure to use when the opportunity arises.  

This past Thursday I attended the Introduction to American Sign Language, which I was initially reluctant to attend. I had never formally learned an ounce of sign language, and I was worried it could be difficult to pick up and use. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the language was not only doable for beginners, but it was also incredibly fun to learn! I was particularly enthralled by the concept of certain colloquialisms existing for sign language in various locations, as it really emphasized the fact that ASL is  no different than any other language. The language suddenly felt more dynamic and lively, something that from an outside perspective, the language can seem to lack. It was really eye-opening to see what communicating via ASL is really like, and I developed a deeper respect for those who are fluent in it. And now that I have been exposed to some of the basics, I feel inspired to continue learning more in hopes of picking up a handy new skill.

I wish I had more opportunities to learn sign language when I was younger, perhaps even as a language in my middle and high school. It really is its own language, and not just an adaptation of English. In fact, ASL is more closely related to French sign language than it is to British sign language! It has a completely different linguistic history and evolution. Learning a little more about sign language also made me think about how the symbols that I associated with sign language are just that; they communicate a thought. English as a whole is the same way, with sounds or images (words) as symbols that represent thoughts, however I’ve been speaking language for so long that I don’t really think about it that way.

I learned the alphabet years ago to talk with my friends during silent fire drills, but spelling out each word always seemed slow and clumsy. I was excited to be able to participate in this presentation, hoping to learn a few words in sign language, but in fact I was able to learn so much more than I thought possible in such a short time. We learned how to introduce ourselves, ask basic questions, and answer questions about our major. I found it really interesting to see how words built on each other, similar to how English has compound words, or shared characteristics, such as directionality or shape, rather than needing an individual sign for each word. Learning about that allowed me to make the connection between ASL and languages in general.

I think everyone should know a few basic words and numbers in ASL, since not only would it be nice to communicate with people who are hard of hearing or deaf, but it might also be important in an emergency or medical situation. Lastly I was surprised by how large of a role expressions play in sign language. For example, if you don’t furrow your eyebrows while asking some questions, then it isn’t a proper question. Expressions are important for English, but pitch and tone are more important. I guess facial expressions are the equivalent.

I had always wanted to learn more about sign language, so this event was a great opportunity for me. I had fun learning how to say the alphabet, introductions, majors, and other random words. It was really interesting to learn little bits of information like how facial expressions are part of the grammar of ASL or how Harvard, Yale, and Princeton based their signs off of the signs for “king,” “queen,” and “prince.” I liked how some of the signs are based on real-world actions, like how the sign for science looks like pouring chemicals out of two beakers. I also think it’s cool how sign language takes advantage of spatial relations. For example, I would gesture to you, then to me, if I wanted to ask “Can you help me?” Learning ASL made me admire the language more. For example, we talked about how some people have their own sign to represent their name versus spelling their name out letter by letter. However, in order to get this sign, it has to be given to you by a member of the deaf community; you can’t just make it up yourself. This helped solidify American Sign Language in my mind as not just a language, but part of a whole culture. In general, learning ASL made me appreciate the deaf community more.

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!