On Learning Sign Language

Every semester at COM (the college where I teach), we can take one free class as part of our benefits package. This semester, I signed up for a six-week course in American Sign Language, and the experience has been quite interesting. I have bad hearing, so I was partly motivated to take the course by a vague notion that it might be good to begin learning sign language now. I've also always been fascinated by Deaf culture in America (the growth of which can at least partly be attributed to earlier educational efforts to quash sign language in America, an effort that included tying the hands of students so that they would learn to speak and write English instead of signing).

ASL is not structurally related to English in terms of syntax or morphology, although it's probably an exaggeration to say it's "completely unrelated" to English, as some claim. Much of the vocabulary has connections to the English word-equivalents. The sign for "french fries," for instance, is made using the sign for the letter "F", and there are many similar signs ("boy" uses the sign for B, and so on). The ASL alphabet (which is not the foundation of the language, but more like a supplement) also corresponds to the English alphabet, and is used for things like spelling names and movie titles. ASL uses a system of understood signs (many of them like picture words), mime, and facial expressions, along with some aspects influenced by American English.

Our instructor (an older woman originally from Thailand, I believe) was terrific, encouraging and supportive, and she worked in a lot of interesting stories about how the signs evolved or what visual pictures originally inspired the signs. The sign for "Spain," for instance, seems to have come from the movements of a bullfighter. ASL is a very original and beautiful language in its own right.

Alas, I don't think I took to learning ASL very well. My instructor did praise my ability to use facial expressions, a skill I must have honed through teaching. On the other hand (no pun intended), I seemed to struggle with remembering the shape of hand required and, whether the palm is supposed to be down or up with a given sign. I also disliked working in pairs, which is something she, quite logically, asked us to do quite often.

On the last day of class, I started to reflect about social anxiety and how that might hamper one's ability to learn language, which is essentially a social activity, after all. The sign-language instructor even mentioned that we were doing better than her other classes, because we weren't as shy. I may have learned to fake not being shy, but I think it still interfered with my ability to really take to sign language (that and a kind of self-consciousness about the body, which also hurt my efforts to learn karate). I'm just guessing here, but I imagine polyglots (those with an ability to learn many languages) would tend to have highly evolved social skills and be able to adapt to new situations easily. I'm afraid I don't fit that bill very well.

Or maybe I just didn't practice enough. There's no substitute for dedicated practice and a serious motivation to learn something. My motivation at this point was simply to be exposed to the language and to get a solid foundation, and I think I accomplished that.