Asl alphabet

Going to be in Seattle for a while in the summer and since becoming *actually* bilingual (or even tri or more, someday, in my fantasies) is a goal of mine I was wondering if anybody had strong recommendations for language learning in the area. In particular I'd probably want to start with Spanish or French; I've studied a bit of Spanish but, uh, it's been a while, and I was never as good at Spanish as I was at ASL...which I wasn't that good at.
I'd certainly be interested in anything from Mandarin to Arabic to Viet to Hindi, I just suspect I'm likely to get a lot of mileage out of French or Spanish when travelling and I'd prefer not to (re)start learning more languages by slapping myself in the face with a totally different alphabet and/or phonemes I have to fight my tongue to pronounce.

Hello! I’m profoundly deaf in both my ears I have a CI and a hearing aid. In my senior year I will be taking asl as my foreign language, because I know zilch except the alphabet. Lately I’ve been insecure about being “hearing” cultured because I’ve never had deaf friends or known deaf people, and those I seen I feel left out because I’m not fluent in asl. Perhaps it would be better for me to staying in the “hearing” world but I hope joining this is at least a teeny step in integrating. Do you have any advice? I’d take any whether it’s insecurity or beginning asl

I’ve been learning German on Duolingo, Spanish through school, and ASL through YouTube and friends. I pick up languages easily. I’d really like to learn Arabic, and I started learning the alphabet on duo, but I’ve heard it’s got some problems in grammar and pronunciation. Is there a free alternative that anyone can recommend? And as a midwestern American, what’s the best dialect to learn? I like to listen to Spanish and German language learner podcasts, so if there’s anything like that for Arabic that someone knows of, that would be cool too.

One of my most beloved and favorite people in the world is almost 4 years old and might have asd.
I tell him all of the time he’s my favorite person and how much I love him and always will.
I let him lead in our interactions and if he wants alone or quiet time I can tell and just let him be him.
He has hyperlexia so I do things like teach him the alphabet in ASL. He loved it and does it forwards and backwards now.
My question is what else could I do or not do to help him grow up happily and feeling secure? He is normally very happy now and I never want that to change.

So some background and context: I am hard of hearing, and it’s supposed to increase in severity over time so I’m trying to be proactive and learn ASL while I’m still mostly hearing so that it isn’t a huge hurdle when my hearing gets worse. The people in my life aren’t as vigilant about it but I’m trying to encourage them to learn with me so I can keep communicating with them effectively later in life.
My university does not have any ASL classes. There’s no club for HOH or D/deaf people on campus. I’ve been getting by with 1 cross-registration class I took at a different college, online courses, sign books, and practicing with friends. I’ve noticed over the course of this year that I keep accumulating more HOH friends, and since getting my hearing aid I’ve been looking at peoples ears a lot more and have realized there’s a larger population of us here than I originally thought.
After talking with another person who lives on my floor that’s deaf, we got to talking about how there isn’t really an on-campus community for us (small school) so we’re losing signing ability due to not being able to practice. Because of this, we decided to make an ASL club on campus. We’ve gotten a lot of support from faculty, we were able to pull together a full board and an advisor pretty quickly, and we have a lot of people interested (which is awesome). We’ve been very clear that WE ARE NOT TEACHERS OR INSTRUCTORS AND ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO BE TEACHERS, but we are providing a space for deaf/hoh people to gather and practice, as well as for hearing people who want to learn for their friends. There’s no prerequisite to be in the club.
We provided print-outs for the alphabet and some basic counting, and so far the club structure has been social time for the first half, then moving into watching Bill Vicars lessons (at a slightly reduced speed) as a group and practicing signing to each other. Moving forward we hope to keep being a space to provide resources for people who want to learn (like sending out YouTube links, announcements when free online courses open registration, etc.) without being teachers ourselves. It’s more like a designated practice space. The only question now is, what could we be doing differently? Does anyone have any suggestions for what else to do with this club to be educational and inclusive? Guest speakers to try and bring in, other free resources we could use, field trip ideas, anything? It seems like we have a lot of people willing to learn and who want to participate, I just don’t know how to best do that beyond what we’re already doing.

I notice that a lot of people tend to say that you should have a reason why or a goal while learning languages. But I don’t ever have that. I love just learning languages. I fall in love with the language with no real goal in mind. I have no plan to speak the language really or to travel to that country or learn for the purpose of a job. As far back as I can remember I just love languages, forms of communication and other forms of writing.
When I was little I saw a entry in an encyclopedia on Morse code and was obsessed with writing out sentences and tapping them out all over the house. Then I found my mother’s short hand book and for a year wrote everything I could in it. Then there was my obsession with braille and ASL, which later I took classes for a few years. I even made up my own alphabet and basics of a language, you know kids stuff. Then my obsession turned to spoken languages, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Korean so far.
I have the desire always to learn and understand, consuming media, movies/ shows, books and the culture but no real want to speak or visit.
I guess was wondering how many folks out there are like me where the goal is the language and the love of learning it.

My special interests often end up being about things I know nothing about and want to understand better. For example:

• Deaf lived experience. I learned basic sign language, I read deaf blogs, I learned loads about hearing culture (FYI: we sneeze funny) and read about challenges experienced by the (deaf and hard of hearing) community, how the world should/could adapt to better support these things. I never use the sign language but I like having a level of understanding (how names work, the alphabet, one handed, ASL v BSL etc).
• The natural hair movement. I'm white but I learned about types of hair, how to style (lots of videos on different styles), challenges in society, challenges in care, challenges in finding salons and the right products.
• Parenting experience. I am happily childfree but it's amazing how much feels secret until you start spending time reading about birth experiences, parenting challenges, isolation, identity, true costs (direct and indirect)...

I do feel guilty sometimes... Sometimes I feel like it's wrong for me to be reading about communities I'm not a part of and others times I think it's helping me learn and be a better ally. Is it okay?
I never really engage in discussions... I just try to learn and absorb. Anyone else do this?
I find it helps me have better understanding and empathy but it also teaches me things I can also benefit from (how blind people know when a cup is full means I can get myself a glass of water in the dark). There are obviously things in every community that there is debate about which is interesting (like disagreements on people centric or identity centric language for autism).

I am trying to teach myself asl and I was wondering if I would sign the alphabet with my right hand even though I’m left handed.

I think maybe it's like how I can tell Japanese, Korean and Chinese apart while some ppl who's not familiar with the languages can't but I'm not sure if I'm correct so i think i better ask.
Like if you see ppl sighing online (can't tell what country they're in) or if they are foreigner, I don't know if they're sighing another languages or I just don't know enough ASL to understand the sigh. A lot of sigh from my country's SL look like ASL sigh but with different meaning so when i saw ppl sigh online I'm quite confuse and with finger spelling as well, like my languages SL use the same sigh as ASL if the alphabet is the same sound as the English alphabet.
Sorry I know this sound really stupid and I'm a really beginner (hearing person)

Context: I am verrrrry begginer asl speaker. I am hearing and have never taken a propee course but my ex girlfriend happened to be deaf and I startedlearningg then. By some chance in highschool one of my main friend groups endwd up being the small group in our dahoh program and I learned a lot from them. I continue to learn vocabulary on my own. Less technical but enough that I can *get points across and understand * asl with some patience on both ends. Obviously I can fingerspell and read easily so I can fill in gaps tediously when they come up. I am nowhere near fluent, maybe "conversational" in the way that you have a conversation with a toddler haha.
Anyways onto my dilemma. My professor found out about my "knowing" asl, and she heavily encouraged me to out it on my resume for our workplace readiness course. I am now actually applying for jobs, and I would like to use that resume. I make it very clear thag I am not and interpreter or fluent but It is a "skill" that I have. And my goal in continuing learning is just to be a non-designated person who can make communication more convenient anywhere I go. Asl or speaking any other language is not a common or high-priority ability where I'm from.
I'm not applying to be an interpreter or a public speakeassistant at all but I feel guilty for having it on my resume as even though it is not a common thing where im from, and therefore a skill, I feel like just knowing the alphabet should be a bare minimum. My professor and another professional have encouraged me to leave it on there but neither are deaf, or involved in the dhoh culture in any way. I've unfortunately lost touch with my highschool friends. Is this an insensitive thing to include in my resume?

So, I know nothing about BSL, I am currently learning ASL. I know a few letters in BSL, and I know their alphabet is 2 handed as opposed to the 1 handed alphabet of ASL. With ASL, you can use one hand to shorten 2 handed signs like if your hand is full or if you only had one hand. So, if your hand was full or if you only had one hand, and you were using BSL, how would you shorten the alphabet to one hand? Like, how would you fingerspell vowels?

So I'm reading the black dagger brotherhood. For me it has been a journey of entertainment and annoyance. But now I'm kinda flabbergasted. I really liked the character of John using ASL and the people around him learning it for inclusiveness. Now I'm reading lover mine and a girl who shall not be named also wants to learn ASL. She mentioned she is a quick study. John shows her the alphabet signs. After learning these she knows ASL. And I'm sitting here going uhhh what now? Does J.D. Ward think ASL is exclusively alphabet based? Am I missing something here? Did she really make a character speak a language without doing the most basic of research? I don't know why but this is really got me stumped and sort of enraged even, but then that might be the emotional disregulation of the brotherhood rubbing of on me. They should get a therapist shellan in ASAP btw 😉. So my fellow romance readers and especially the ones who know more about ASL please help my head stop spinning. On a note: I'm in no way a expert on ASL. I know a little bit of ISL because I used babysigns and a friend of my children is non-verbal.
Edited to add: I use duolingo to learn Spanish. Does anyone know if a equivalent app is out there to learn sign language?

At first I was taking asl 101 for a gen ed class but I want to continue until I’m fluent. I know some Spanish but I have to take asl because I didn’t do very well in high school. Why was it hard for me to learn Spanish but not asl? I have no real background in signing other than in elementary school we had to learn the alphabet and learned sign for a couple songs but all the information is long forgotten so it’s like I might as well have not done it.

Hi! I am hearing, but I want to take ASL classes, not for any particular reason. I am unable to sign up until my sophomore year (currently 8th grade) as I already picked classes for freshman year. I learned how to sign numbers 1-9, and each letter in the alphabet. I mostly have it down except for a few letters like K, P and Q, plus some mistakes in my signing. I also know a few words and can form basic sentences by putting them together, but that’s SEE grammar and not ASL, right? (Correct me if I’m wrong please)
I’m just wondering if knowing how to form SEE sentences, plus a couple ASL sentences, would be helpful for an ASL class. I mostly learn signs through a free app (Though only a few lessons are free and there’s nothing about forming sentences in them) and YouTube, if that makes any difference. Thanks for your help!

Hi!!!! I'm interested in learning VR ASL (so far I have gotten the first four letters of the alphabet!)
I was wondering if there's any worlds where you can self teach ASL? I'm a very slow learner and learn best when self taught :)
And are there any furry avatars that are VR ASL friendly? I noted with the main avatars I currently use, they either can't make a peace sign or the 'hang loose'/surfer hand
I am also open to advice and suggestions!! :) Thank you!!! :D
Edit: I wrote 'hangs up' instead of 'hang loose', facepalm!

Honestly, it hasn’t been in a destructive or condescending way. I just find it funny that, if there’s a religious old lady who walks into my store (and I’ve worked 3 different locations now), they always come up to ME.
So the conversations usually don’t start off about religion. But then idk it’ll just get there. I’ve had two women tell me they think I’m very special and they know I’ll be saved; keep in mind that I do my best to not engage in the conversations, as I’m not religious, so I just kinda stand there awkwardly and go “uh huh”. The first lady actually did ask me if I believed in Jesus, and I said I’d rather not discuss it at work.
She brought me a book about Jesus (not the Bible, it was called “Not an Ordinary Carpenter,” or something along those lines) and wrote me a very sweet note. I have not opened the book once (besides reading the note).
The Second Lady was a little more invasive. She started coming in for nothing and would just waste my time by talking to me about nonsense. She gave me a book she wrote about being saved.
I helped a sweet old deaf customer and when she was about to leave, she gave me a cute little pocket card with the ASL alphabet on it. On the back was the “ASL guide to Jesus” or something lmao.
And then the other day a lady, unprompted, gave me a pocket pamphlet John Newton’s crazy ass life before coming to Jesus.
Idk why it’s always me 😂 the only time it’s really bothered me was with the lady who would come in and waste my time. For the most part I just think it’s funny.

Looking into this for a story I am working on. I am non-fluent in ASL but I know just enough to know I need to ask a question. ☺️
For ASL users in a technical field or in Greek life at school—what do you do, if anything, to distinguish the Greek and ASL manual alphabets? My basic research showed that the two have strong similarities, much more so than hearing the names of the letters in English. It looks like while a few letters are immediately distinct (G vs. Gamma), many I can’t tell apart from the ASL manual alphabet that I know.
Would it be purely a matter of context whether someone is signing A or Alpha? Such as, for example, knowing it has to be Alpha because you’re talking about statistical significance, or a fraternity someone is in? Or is there any other cue that would immediately make the distinction clear regardless of context?
And then there’s Eta, which looks like an H in both writing and sign. Oh boy!

Hey y’all! My name is Evelyn and I feel really bad that I haven’t learned ASL since I was young. My brother low functioning autism and even when they taught him simple ASL, he would just forget. I feel bad that I haven’t learned at a younger age b/c he’s my brother, but at the same time I also had to learn Spanish for my parents. Now I’m in my last year of high school (also graduating) and I only know how to sign the alphabet and numbers 1-100. People have told me why I would learn just for my brother to not understand, but I want to help anyone I can. The only thing I lack is motivation. I never have time for anything since I have extracurriculars, work, and school. I also have heard that YouTube doesn’t teach proper ASL, which I come and ask if it’s true. To me that’s the only thing I’m working with since here where I am there are no schools in my district that offers ASL classes and I’ve been looking on FaceBook (on my dad’s account) and no one is tutoring ASL, and I’ve been trying to find like a corporation or something that teaches people ASL but NOTHING. :( The nearest place stands in Atl. Georgia which is too far away. Sorry about me rambling, but I just don’t know how I can learn ASL effectively. Any tips? Anything is welcomed :)