May 3, 2022 - 23:16
Hello all,
Here is my final project website that serves as a beginner's guide to learning ASL by a beginner (me) who is currently learning ASL. In this website, I made sure to include historical information about Deaf culture and highlighted the work of different Deaf creators. This page can serve as a first step for those wishing to better understand this language and is complete with lists and lists of avialable and useful resources when learning about ASL. Here is the link to the page!
https://sites.google.com/haverford.edu/asl-a-beginners-guide/home
Comments
Cool!
Submitted by Piper on May 5, 2022 - 15:11 Permalink
I liked your project and the format you chose! I really appreciated all the resources and various options of information intake you added like videos, web pages, text, etc. I found that very engaging! I have also been learning ASL and am a beginer about to attempt taking ASL II next semester. I liked watching some of the videos you posted without subtitles to see if I could take away what they were signing, it was a fun challenege for me! Some stuff I have learned in my classes that really interested me that your presentation reminded me of was some of the influences of current ASL, you mention all the various signed languages all over the world and I think it's cool that ASL in particular draws from French Signed Language, home sign, Indiginous sign languages and more! Such an extensive history! I also thought of some of the history my professor has been teaching us in regards to Black ASL or BASL and the impacts of segregation and the civil rights movement on signed language in the US and the legacies of this to this day, an interesting area for more research maybe. Loved the project, we should practice signing together :)
This is an awesome resource!
Submitted by Charlie on May 12, 2022 - 10:47 Permalink
This is an awesome resource! Many beginner ASL sites are purely focused on learning individual words rather than understanding ASL in a broader cultural context, so the fact that yours provides both is wonderful. I appreciate that your website places ASL in the larger world as well, by showing it being used in social media, film, and news. I think a lot of hearing people overlook the fact that ASL is the third most widly used language in the US and see it as purely a language within the Deaf community, so showing the ways that ASL shows up in the hearing world is very important.
I also appreciated how you discussed some bad reasons for learning ASL. While there has definitely been greater representation of ASL and Deaf culture online, there has also been a lot of appropriative behaviour in regards to the language, so pointing that out in a beginner website is a crucial thing to do. I've found that another popular (but wrong) reason for learning ASL is just to learn dirty/cuss words, so if you feel up to it you may want to add a note about that as well.
In any case, thank you for making this resource and good luck on your ASL journey!