Alan's Blog

Successful New Years Resolutions - I Learned American Sign Language!

Every year I like to make New Years Resolutions1. I'll often make a handful of them, knowing most I won't complete, but anything that does stick really sticks well. Here's my lists over the past few years, and where I actually ended up on each:

2021

2022

2023

Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss you'll land among the stars, or something like that, right?

Inspiration for Learning American Sign Language

The inspiration comes from several places. The most important being my wife's cousin who is our age and has a child roughly the same age as our kid is Deaf. The cousin married a Deaf person as well, and although their child is hearing it's beneficial to be able to communicate with each other particularly as we see each other several times a year. At family gatherings, it can be tough for anyone who is deaf around hearing people to be able to follow conversation, and they often get ignored. This makes me feel awful since it happens so frequently, yet over the many years I've been part of gatherings, the same patterns tend to unfold. I'd like to be someone they can talk to, plus with similarly aged kids and the kids being young right now, it's important we can talk and watch out for each other's families.

Sign language also became my daughter's preferred language. She is hearing, she is speaking, and as she grows up it turns out she loves learning languages. Her first language though was sign because it allows children to communicate earlier than they normally could if waiting for speech. This allowed us to know clearly when she was hungry, thirsty, or wanted more food. As she grew older, she continued preferring sign and regularly still asks "what is the sign for word?" Since she loves it so much, and there's significant benefits like being able to talk with my daughter across a room or park, it's worthwhile to learn.

In college I realized there are significant benefits to being able to think with different style languages. English, along with many languages including French, Spanish, Italian, and German are based more in description. As evidenced in this post, ideas are shared via description and stringing multiple words together. Other languages, including Chinese and ASL communicate concepts by joining several different ideas/meanings together to create a word or sign which encompasses what that concept is. In ASL these exist all over the place from things like tapping on your head to sign Lettuce (as in a head of lettuce) to making a Y with your hand and moving it backward to indicate yesterday as something physically behind you. Thinking differently can give you different perspectives, and that gives a larger world view and understanding of others.

Finding a Teacher

I went to the App Store on my phone and downloaded every free ASL app available.

tl;dr: If you want to learn ASL, go get InterSign ASL.

It's free (ad-supported). There is an optional premium version which adds offline access, additional sign angles, and games and extras. Without premium you are still able to access all of the core content and learn ASL. This is greatly appreciated since it ensures learning ASL is accessible to everyone. I use it on iOS. It looks like it's also available on Android. Similar in style to Duolingo, it gives a complete overview of signs, the alphabet, and proper grammar structure.

Throughout the year my frequency has varied from daily to once a week or less often. As of writing, they offer a total of 12 sections and I'm in section 7. My favorite feature is once a day they have a button titled "Learn" which pulls up a random previous lesson for you to refresh your memory. This is particularly useful to remember less common signs.

Early on I also used PocketSign, which once a day offered a daily lesson that taught a few extra signs. This was a nice jump start, however ultimately it lost out to InterSign due to needing to pay to do do their full course. The daily lesson did differ each day, so you can get some bonus content which is great.

Putting It To Use

It's one thing to tap through an app and recognize you know signs, and another thing to actually use the signs. I've been pleased that after doing all of this I've noticed an increased ability to use sign. While my knowledge is far from complete, I am able to successfully communicate with others using ASL.

Outside of learning additional signs, now I'm at the point where in order to to improve I would need to sign more frequently. Also, my spelling is terrible, this goes beyond sign though where I'm finding there's a lot of words that while I can type easily due to muscle memory, but if I need to consciously spell them it's tougher than I would like it to be. Since spelling is a fallback in ASL when a sign isn't known or doesn't exist, becoming better at spelling in general would help out a lot here too.

Next Year

Learning ASL was fun and had real benefits. I'm going to continue lessons and at least finish up InterSign's 12 sections, then likely continue perpetually by doing refreshers before hanging out with family who use ASL. Completing a resolution feels good, and over the years it's fun to look back and see what did I accomplish, what were the motivations, and what was the impact. In general: resolutions are good and make me a better person.

Here's my resolution list for next year, maybe I'll finally drink more water.

Footnotes 🐾

  1. New Years Resolutions are things you wish to improve upon or new habits to make or break in the coming year. January 1st is a decent time to do it because cognitively it's easy to say "new year, new you." That said, scientifically speaking most resolutions do not continue past January and it's probably not the best way to make real change in your life. It is fun though!↩

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