Struggling with reading ASL Sentences

Question

I'm in my second ASL class in college, Intermediate ASL. I got a B in beginner ASL but I felt like I only passed because the professor was nice and wanted everyone to pass. I know the alphabet and I know the numbers and a large handful random words (really that's all we did for 16 weeks in Beginner ASL). Now I am in intermediate ASL with a different professor and right from week 1 we have to translate full sentences. A lot of words I have never seen before. I still don't fully understand sentence structure. The way the class works is, we login to an online program that's kind of like Pearson where we watch videos of a man signing sentences and we have to type out the sentences and submit them to the professor. The professor then grades our answers. I'm using Lifeprint to learn ASL on my own but this class moves so much faster than Lifeprint does that it's hard to keep up. We don't have any deaf studies at my college and as far as know we don't have a large population of deaf students. I go to a small state school. I've tried getting some of the students together to form a study group but none of them seem to care. I think they are content with getting a C in the class and not giving a shit. (I'm 27 and most of them are 19-21). At this point I wonder if I should simply take this class as Pass/Fail and try to learn ASL through Lifeprint on my own after the class. When you are unfamiliar with a word, is there a better way to learn words you are unfamiliar with they pop up in a sentence? I try googling the hand movements but I get nothing.

Answer 1

I would agree with Apolonio. Focus on the signs you do know in the sentence. Always consider the context of the assignment as well. Is it someone going to the store, a baseball game, a wedding, etc. That will give you a genre of words to GC goose from. Then I would write out each word in the sentence you did understand. After that use predictive translating to see what sign you missed would make sense in the sentence. We do this a LOT in fingerspelling :)

A very common sentence structure would be TOPIC-COMMENT. For example in English I would say “I’m going to the park” but in ASL using topic-comment you would sign PARK I GO-TO. Think big picture first and then all the details to follow.

Hope that helps!

Ashley

Answer 2

Hi. Sometimes if you know the word you can look up the word to see how it is signed, but if you don't know what the person is signing then it will be really hard to try to find the sign just by describing the hand motions.

However, sometimes you can catch one or two signs in a sentence and then you will get what the sentence is talking about.

If you ever need help with wanting to know how to sign something or if you want to try to describe the hand movements to me, then I will be more than happy to help you.