Learning ASL: Lesson 02 - Reflection

 My second ASL Lesson was about 39-minutes in video length. After each new word that was taught I paused the video and tried to perform the motion like Instructor Bill. With each pause my total time of today’s sitting- broken up throughout the school day- was 1:01:46. As mentioned, I started my second lesson during the school day in my classes that were free periods. I realized that if I only do one video a day then I will only get through the 2nd unit (not even complete the unit entirely) by the end of this project. There are a total of four units with 60 lessons so for the continuing weeks I will try to do more than one video a day. When I get home I will attempt to do another lesson~ 

At the start of today I was weary of continuing my video lessons and practicing the movements during my class periods; I was nervous that I would not retain as much information in busy environments. I do believe my nerves were relatively correct as I was slightly less concentrated on my activities and did stop and start the video lesson for reasons outside of just practicing movements. Moving forward I might just watch my video lessons at home. 

In the 2nd lesson Instructor Bill taught Jen (and the viewers of the video) vocabulary of families. In this sitting I learned the words: boy, man, brother, child, children, dad, divorce, girl, woman, grandma, grandpa, have, hey, how, how many, live, address, marriage, husband, wife, marry, married, spouse, mom, parents, single, alone, someone, something, sister, spell, work, and possessive nouns, (his, her, its, my, our, their yours). At the end of this lesson, “Bonus Words” were also taught that include: one-half (or half), half-brother, step-mother, half-sister, step-father, grandson, and granddaughter (to my dismay it is not a singular sign, but a spelling of grand and then the movement for son / daughter, I wish the phrase was one word). 

Certain words had the same hand structure and movement but different starting positions, this difference differentiated words from each other. Words that have the same meaning but are differentiated by gender (grandpa and grandma for example) are an example of the same hand structure and movement but different starting positions. In general, female-related familiar words (mom, grandma, sister) have starting positions of movement towards the lower face whereas male-related familiar words (dad, grandpa, brother) have starting positions of movement towards the upper head. I found this difference interesting and wonder if these starting positions reflect that ASL was created by a man. To elaborate on this thought, the male-related word motions start above the female-related word motions on the face and this difference implies “men are higher, or superior compared to women”'. Perhaps I am reading too much into these movements, but why can’t female-related word motions start above male’s? More research into the origins of ASL are in order… 

Anyway, I thought this sitting was very informative! I am thoroughly enjoying learning ASL so far and quite excited for continuing. I will report back with descriptions of the history of ASL in the near future and updates on next lesson videos.