TOTJO American Sign Language Learning

Ok guys, now I know things kinda slid of the map with me but thats no excuse for the rest of this group! Who is still interested? I'm thinking of designing a weekly lesson plan, so if your interested, my first question is at what pace are you guys/gals going to feel comfortable? meaning not everyone can learn the alphabet in a week, but maybe a few letters and so on? Every lesson done will be posted in a way that anyone who joins later can take at their own pace but I want to design it for those of us who have these things called lives too.

Phew -- I haven't done too much lately, aside from poke around the basic signs, mainly because of how dang busy I am! But, my girlfriend is planning on taking a course in ASL in the Fall and I'm planning on practicing alongside her, so that should be fun. How's practice going for everyone?

Feeling relatively secure in my ability to fingerspell now, so I'll be working on actual signs before long! It'll require a bit more attention on my part and the last couple of weeks have been BUSY (as will the next two weeks, I'm sure), but I'm looking forward to moving farther into things. Has anyone else played around with it? Have any cool stories of practicing it to tell?

Getting so much better! My alphabet is far more fluid now, and I'm getting to the point where I can sign it pretty quickly. I'm going to start practicing it backwards for added complexity. I've also begun signing full words one letter at a time -- it's slow, but REALLY valuable. Since there aren't anywhere near as many true signs as words in the English language there will always be a point in time where you'll need to know how to quickly sign whole words -- names, for instance. It's cool knowing that, already, even if I'm a bit slow, I could handle entire customer service transactions through nothing but ASL. Which reminds me, I can solidly sign 1-10 now, and transition between them fast enough to show pretty much any combination of numbers (haven't gone on to the advanced number signs yet).

My thumb literally can't stretch far enough to make a proper "m" LOL