A few years ago most of the people who lived in my house at the time all signed up for an ASL class together. I mostly retain the alphabet, though not very quickly or fluidly, but most of the others don’t, even though I stopped going halfway through because I was too pregnant and nobody else had that problem. I have never encountered an opportunity to use any signs “in the wild” since this occasion, even opportunities that weren’t usable at my level but would have been if I were more conversational. Once, before I’d ever studied ASL, I encountered a deaf customer at my summer job; I printed off some blank receipt tape so we could write to each other and that worked fine. I’m theoretically on board with baby sign as a concept but no one has ever been able to actionably explain to me how you are supposed to sign at a baby: my experience with babies is that they require your arms for other tasks on a basically constant basis and are seldom naturalistically at an angle where they could watch a sign. ASL is difficult to study compared with any language with an alphabet or orthographic transliteration, because you have to absorb information at the speed of conversation, not at the speed of reading; illustrations are lossy and the technical side of managing video or gif playback and visual attention thereto is much more awkward than reading static pinyin or kana or what have you.
I don’t want to totally take the wind out of your sails! ASL is cool and I agree it would be a great offering at schools. Minimum viable sign vocabularies could, given critical mass, be a convenient subcultural toolkit, and learning the language entire is certainly at least as worthwhile a hobby as learning any other language. But I don’t think its value proposition is quite as overwhelming as you describe.
Sign for babies is totally useful, even if more in the way of dog buttons. It’s quite cute seeing my <1 year old niece ask for food, show that she needs the toilet etc. using simple hand gestures that both sides understand. She doesn’t have a large vocabulary by any standard, but it makes communication a lot easier and cuts down on mutual frustrations.
In practice you both say and sign what you want—the baby will pick it up quite quickly and start using the signs as soon as it can handle the physical movements, after which you can just use the verbal part and watch for the appropriate reaction.
I only recognize asking for milk (closed fist up and down) and asking for more (she opens her mouth and shows her tongue to show that her mouth is empty), but my sister uses more.
I’m theoretically on board with baby sign as a concept but no one has ever been able to actionably explain to me how you are supposed to sign at a baby: my experience with babies is that they require your arms for other tasks on a basically constant basis and are seldom naturalistically at an angle where they could watch a sign.
Good point and interesting question. I guess when they’re slightly older there are more opportunities to sign at them, and before that maybe other people around the baby need to sign too (including when they’re talking to you). This raises an interesting question of how much of getting talked to vs hearing others talk to each other accounts for language adoption in babies.
“Baby sign” is just a dozen or so concepts like “more”, “help”, “food”, “cold” etc. The main benefit is that the baby can learn to control thier hands before they learn to control thier vocal chords.
FWIW I genuinely think ASL is easy to learn with the videos I linked above. Overall I think sign is more worthwhile to learn than most other languages, but yes, not some overwhelming necessity. Just very personally enriching and neat. :)
I watched one of the videos and it was clearly a great example of the category. And yet. I think ease of learning varies with language and also with learner. ASL in particular seems likely to be very interpersonally variable—I definitely found it harder than making equivalent progress in French, Chinese, or Japanese, and those last two are famously considered difficult for English-natives. It requires manual dexterity! If you get confused in the middle of a sign language sentence you’re going to poke yourself in the ear or tangle your elbows together or something. You have to look at people’s facial expressions, they have grammatical import—you have to look at those and at their hands. There’s no good way to take notes because it has no written form or transliteration; I wound up, in my class, writing down things like “quotey eyes” (I don’t even remember what that word was) and trying to hang muscle memory on the resemblance between “sorry” and “Canada”. I’m glad you find it easy and exciting! But I believe you’re overgeneralizing.
As a deaf person, I’m always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don’t know what to do with their hands and end up “tangling their elbows together”, as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they’d been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.
Not to diminish the difficulty—to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it’s still exhausting for an interpreter who’s only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.
I’m just saying. I don’t think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don’t know what it’s like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it’s usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang—the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you’re talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.
I appreciate this timeline! My emergency plan if I unexpectedly have a deaf baby one day is to find someone fluent in sign language to move in with us and do, if necessary, hardcore sign immersion, and 3-5 months is quick enough that I would not need to worry about the baby acquiring brain damage.
A few years ago most of the people who lived in my house at the time all signed up for an ASL class together. I mostly retain the alphabet, though not very quickly or fluidly, but most of the others don’t, even though I stopped going halfway through because I was too pregnant and nobody else had that problem. I have never encountered an opportunity to use any signs “in the wild” since this occasion, even opportunities that weren’t usable at my level but would have been if I were more conversational. Once, before I’d ever studied ASL, I encountered a deaf customer at my summer job; I printed off some blank receipt tape so we could write to each other and that worked fine. I’m theoretically on board with baby sign as a concept but no one has ever been able to actionably explain to me how you are supposed to sign at a baby: my experience with babies is that they require your arms for other tasks on a basically constant basis and are seldom naturalistically at an angle where they could watch a sign. ASL is difficult to study compared with any language with an alphabet or orthographic transliteration, because you have to absorb information at the speed of conversation, not at the speed of reading; illustrations are lossy and the technical side of managing video or gif playback and visual attention thereto is much more awkward than reading static pinyin or kana or what have you.
I don’t want to totally take the wind out of your sails! ASL is cool and I agree it would be a great offering at schools. Minimum viable sign vocabularies could, given critical mass, be a convenient subcultural toolkit, and learning the language entire is certainly at least as worthwhile a hobby as learning any other language. But I don’t think its value proposition is quite as overwhelming as you describe.
Sign for babies is totally useful, even if more in the way of dog buttons. It’s quite cute seeing my <1 year old niece ask for food, show that she needs the toilet etc. using simple hand gestures that both sides understand. She doesn’t have a large vocabulary by any standard, but it makes communication a lot easier and cuts down on mutual frustrations.
In practice you both say and sign what you want—the baby will pick it up quite quickly and start using the signs as soon as it can handle the physical movements, after which you can just use the verbal part and watch for the appropriate reaction.
I only recognize asking for milk (closed fist up and down) and asking for more (she opens her mouth and shows her tongue to show that her mouth is empty), but my sister uses more.
Good point and interesting question. I guess when they’re slightly older there are more opportunities to sign at them, and before that maybe other people around the baby need to sign too (including when they’re talking to you). This raises an interesting question of how much of getting talked to vs hearing others talk to each other accounts for language adoption in babies.
“Baby sign” is just a dozen or so concepts like “more”, “help”, “food”, “cold” etc. The main benefit is that the baby can learn to control thier hands before they learn to control thier vocal chords.
FWIW I genuinely think ASL is easy to learn with the videos I linked above. Overall I think sign is more worthwhile to learn than most other languages, but yes, not some overwhelming necessity. Just very personally enriching and neat. :)
I watched one of the videos and it was clearly a great example of the category. And yet. I think ease of learning varies with language and also with learner. ASL in particular seems likely to be very interpersonally variable—I definitely found it harder than making equivalent progress in French, Chinese, or Japanese, and those last two are famously considered difficult for English-natives. It requires manual dexterity! If you get confused in the middle of a sign language sentence you’re going to poke yourself in the ear or tangle your elbows together or something. You have to look at people’s facial expressions, they have grammatical import—you have to look at those and at their hands. There’s no good way to take notes because it has no written form or transliteration; I wound up, in my class, writing down things like “quotey eyes” (I don’t even remember what that word was) and trying to hang muscle memory on the resemblance between “sorry” and “Canada”. I’m glad you find it easy and exciting! But I believe you’re overgeneralizing.
As a deaf person, I’m always teaching people to sign, like when I move into a new house, and I do see a difference between learners. Some people don’t know what to do with their hands and end up “tangling their elbows together”, as you so vividly describe, while others have a talent as if they’d been waiting to sign all their lives. But this gap mostly closes after 3-5 months of living together. Even people who were pretty bad at the beginning end up being able to interpret a group conversation for me.
Not to diminish the difficulty—to do anything like interpret a group conversation, the whole group needs to put in some effort to slow down and speak only one at a time, and it’s still exhausting for an interpreter who’s only been learning for a few months. Not to mention the food on their plate goes cold.
I’m just saying. I don’t think a lack of progress necessarily something to scare you, but then again, I don’t know what it’s like to learn sign without someone to sign with. Pretty sure it’s usually a lot faster to become a productive conversator in any sign language than any spoken natural lang—the only thing you really need is the hand alphabet, and then the person you’re talking to can show you the signs for every new word you spell out.
I appreciate this timeline! My emergency plan if I unexpectedly have a deaf baby one day is to find someone fluent in sign language to move in with us and do, if necessary, hardcore sign immersion, and 3-5 months is quick enough that I would not need to worry about the baby acquiring brain damage.