This past week, I have been practicing all of the signs that I learned and have showed these new skills to nearly all of my friends and several family members as well. A couple of the people I shared with knew sign language already, and were able to offer me helpful suggestions. In particular, I learned that instead of doing a closed fist hug and then pointing for “I love you,” I can instead put your middle and ring finger down and hold up the other fingers. This is a type of sign language “slang,” because it is simpler/quicker. In addition to that, I now know the letters H and Y, but I am still struggling with remembering a few remaining letters.

I found this video to be very helpful. I appreciated that the sign was written out, both what the action is and what it meant, and also demonstrated at the same time. I found the repetition made it a lot easier to learn at the pace of the video, without having to pause it to practice in between. In addition to that, her facial expressions properly conveyed the emotions of the signs, something that I found lacked in previous videos that I watched.

New signs I learned this week:

• Hello
• I
• Father
• Mother
• Help
• Please
• Wait
• Food
• Go to
• Learn

I encountered a few challenges when uploading these videos. The file sizes were too large to upload. I began by splitting one video into two, but they were still too large. I then redownloaded them with a lower quality and resolution so that I was able to incorporate them on my blog.

I hope to become more comfortable with creating sentences in the next weeks, so that I can slowly build up my conversational abilities. I am very proud of the progress that I made, and I am excited to continue pursuing this project.