My journey learning Sign Language
As a youth on the journey to college and battling high school, I find myself lacking the spare hours to do things that I feel are necessary to give back to my community. Between the homework, the extracurriculars, the family and friends, my own downtime, and enough sleep to sustain my health- I find myself pushing charity and goodness to the back burner, despite wanting to be a more donating person to my society.
The idea of doing ‘good’ has always plagued me. I felt not an obligation to do charity work or actively be kind for any type of reward, but as a pang of hunger that I needed to quell. It’s a deep-set feeling of duty that I need to meet, however, I could never focus on it enough because of the multitude of other things I wanted to conquer.
I understand that this is a discussion of priorities. However, in the age of capitalism and my measurement of worth being solely on the amount of grinding I am capable of doing, it’s a little bit more difficult than just simply saying ‘it’s not a priority.’ Now, regardless of what your priorities are, it’s challenging to do everything right.
In the eighth grade, I watched a horror movie with my cousins. I have always been a horror fan, though not enough of one to watch them regularly. I am easy to scare. The movie we chose that night frightened me no less, it’s called Hush and is available for viewing on Netflix.
The movie’s main character is a deaf and dumb woman, who communicated through sign language to her neighbor and boyfriend. Seeing the fluency in which she signed, I was inspired. I found it fascinating that despite being in a compromised situation she found ways to communicate.
I realized my ignorance in this area of life, and for this community. How little exposure I had to my impaired peers, and how ignorant I must come off to them if we were ever to meet was something that rattled me.
(I cannot pretend eighth grade me was also incredibly impressed with the physical ways of communicating and fancied having some sort of secret language)
It has been three years and the process has been persistent but capricious, as I’ve never quite formed a solid enough string of habits to practice. This is of course work in progress and it’s working itself out.
Every night I maintain a diary in which I write a short summary of how my day went. This consists of what I ate, my general mood, and any highlights. It’s no more than 100 words and I try to incorporate as many new words as I can. I then spend my time looking up the signs for these words, as well as people signing the same phrases (or similar ones). After I am confident I can sign these sentences in any order, and the words translate to sign smoothly, I record a video of myself speaking as well as signing at once so when I want to revise what I wrote, it’s easy for me to recollect the words.
I would very highly recommend this method of language learning. Keeping a diary and then dictating what you wrote out loud is a fantastic way to make you think in that language. I apply the same technique to learning Spanish for school.
To date, I am able to sign a basic introduction of who I am as well as maintain simple conversation. I aim to increase my fluency while signing as well as broaden my vocabulary by the end of this year. A more tangible set of goals is to be able to sign the 100 most commonly used words in any language. I also want to be able to fluently hand sign, as my alphabet is flimsy at best ( my memory is another thing I need to work on)
This experience has been enlightening and fun. There’s something delightful in enriching yourself, especially when it contributes to someone or something other than yourself. I will keep you all updated as I venture on this journey, and I urge all of you to expand your horizons and probe the difficult parts of your mind to do better.
