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.
