Okay, you mugs know everything else, where to learn American Sign Language online?

[Tobra]

There must be a good website for this, or even a good youtube channel. The answer to every question ever pondered resides here, so do me a solid and point me the right direction.

[Flatbutt1]

I've been looking at this myself of late. I haven't found anything that's comprehensive AND free. There are sites that offer a dozen or so common hand signs but everything else I've found s pay to play.

[Mike80911]

When I was a Police Officer a few of us took it upon ourselves to learn. We went to the local school for the deaf and the students taught us sign language. They were happy to do it and were grateful we wanted to learn to communicate with them. We all had a great time with them. Maybe check with a local school for guidance

[Tobra]

Mike, that is genius

[Bill Douglas]

The local Maoris do sign language to us white people. This is known as the Maori Salute.

[stevej37]

I thought all tv's today had close captioning.

[LEAKYSEALS951]

To Tobra and Mike-
Tobra- is this for work? or personal?
Mike? How hard was it to learn?

Reason I ask is that I was under the impression sign was a pretty complex language that not only had different hand signals, but entirely different sentence composition for sake of brevity. I could be totally wrong on this.

Last week, at my public health office, I had a translator on a zoom type call sign out for a patient. As with most other languages, the dental stuff gets really technical. There's no way I could learn any other language with proficiency, let alone sign. We hooked up the sign translator on the phone, I spoke to the patient, and watched out the corner of my eye as about 10,000 hand signals went forth and back in lightning quick procession.

I always find it interesting how I could ask a simple 1 second question, and the patient and translator would get embroiled in an intricate 2 minute back and forth.

For me, I depend on the translators, not only because of the technicality of the conversation, but the high number of different flavors to be translated. I always got a kick when the hispanic translators could not understand the patient due to the intrinsic varieties of their own language.

If there was a way to learn some basic stuff, that'd be nice, but no way in hell I could do justice to what I saw last Friday on the smart phone zoom call.

[peppy]

We never have found one that would work for us. We tried (https://www.lifeprint.com/index.htm) American Sign Language University.

Thankfully our son will take it next year for his foreign language requirement for graduation.

[Tobra]

I have people I want to talk to

[HobieMarty]

Youtube is your friend.

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

[id10t]

I know we offer several ASL courses, and even pre Covid we had them online

Ill try to remember who teaches them and see if I can get you some useful info

[Flatbutt1]

That'd be great. Now that I'm riding with the first aid squad I'm thinking ASL could come in handy.

[Rusty Heap]

I know several Scuba Divers learned to sign and talk underwater.

[Mike80911]

[QUOTE=LEAKYSEALS951;12174370]To Tobra and Mike-
Tobra- is this for work? or personal?
Mike? How hard was it to learn?

As with any language, certainly not easy to learn. Spent days on just spelling out each other's names. But just getting basics to help somewhat communicate comes in very handy. Today with smart phones you can simply type messages to each other. Even back then the students had a device that allowed them to type messages on. Had such a great time with these kids, I actually ended up assigning one of my youth officers to the school on a daily basis to do some programs with them. She became very fluent in ASL after a lot of practice and daily interactions.

[Arizona_928]

Community college…

The ones in Phoenix offer evening classes for a few hundred bucks

[911 Rod]

There must be an app for this.
We use speaking language apps at work for our "new Canadian" customers.

[masraum]

I feel like I remember seeing an article in the last 6 months or so about there being lots of resources out there teaching ASL that were doing a bad job. I was unable to find the article, so I don't really have any more detail than that.

In trying to find the article, I found someone that said that many folks that that it's NOT OK for someone that can hear to teach ASL. That deaf people are oppressed, and only deaf people should teach ASL. It was a YT video by a woman who is an interpreter and whose wife is deaf. It's fine to be a councilor or even interpreter just so long as you aren't teaching it. I was surprised. But then I've had pretty much 0 experience with deaf folks other than seeing them in places like Sesame St when I was a kid or TV or movies. And there's a cashier at the Whole Foods that we go to who is deaf. Apparently, there's some controversy, some folks think that it doesn't matter who teaches it.

Based on the article that I previously mentioned, I'd do research to try to ensure that whatever resource I found (at least if it's free and online) is a good one.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by 911 Rod

"new Canadian"

What's "new Canadian" mean? Is that the PC term for foreign folks that have moved to Canada?

[911 Rod]

Originally Posted by masraum

What's "new Canadian" mean? Is that the PC term for foreign folks that have moved to Canada?

yes

[id10t]

Much like taking Spanish or French or whatever in college, you'll get out of it what you put into it. Everyone I know who has completed the course has been able to at that point have a basic conversation with a deaf person (that is the final exam). The ones that keep the skill up after final exams end up being fairly fluent. And yes, it does count as foreign language credit that is required to graduate...

Quoth the course description -

"ASL 1140 introduces students to the basic components of American Sign Language (ASL) as used in the Deaf community as well as to various manual communication systems and philosophies. Introduction to Deaf Culture and items related to the Deaf community will be discussed. This course is intended for students who have no or minimal American Sign Language (ASL) skills focuses on communication primarily in social and work environments. The course will also give an overview of sign language through general discussion of ASL structure and its use in society today. Students will learn to use ASL to (1) ask and answer questions (2) exchange personal information (3) discuss their jobs (4) discuss their families (5) discuss where they are from, and (6) to make appointments. "