After meeting a few deaf friends via the Internet and through a social network community, I took to try ASL and bought a comprehensive phrase book. After some 20-odd pages, I could not converse but knew numbers and alphabets. That expensive little book with colourful pictures of a man signing the vocabulary found itself a restful spot on my bookshelf for almost a decade.
But after watching three weeks of the series and some catch-up episodes I missed, I realise that what was signed on the show was "different" from how the "expensive little book" presented it. Then I followed up with Sean Berdy's YouTube.com channel and found his mesmerising video featuring Enrique Iglesias' "Hero" song. It was like magic; what he signed was clear, lucid, and simply made it so possible to understand and mimic. There was that angelic expression on his face communicating the wide spectrum of emotions from pain to deep love, and all the while his hands flitted about in harmonious gestures, as if it was meant to match the rhythm and the lyrics - the way the wind blows and you can't feel it watching it on screen, but the hem of a skirt or the folds of a silken curtain curls, and you "get it".
There seemed to be something more about "signing" than I thought and I did not have any deaf person to get in touch with to learn or practise, not that it would be a good idea, short of enrolling in a formal course. But intuitively, I knew that signing should be easy enough to pick up and establish a basic vocabulary. The question is, whether it was like some sport and one needed a particular aptitude for it?
At the local library just a week ago, I chanced on an Idiot's Guide edition to ASL. The foreword written by the authors - a mother/daughter team, spoke to me in concrete ways and made me confident. Their objective was to create an opportunity to increase contact between deaf and hearing people, not because it was important, but because signing was infact easy, so easy, children learn it even before they might a formal language like "English". That fact struck me.
I flipped through the book and the first chapters did not touch on signing the alphabets. That shocked and pleased me. Instead, what the authors did was brilliant: they explained how signing came to be, how deaf people learn it, that signing was in fact a language with a syntax of its own (closer to conversational Japanese than to English), and was adapted into a version called Contact Signing, to facilitate usage between the deaf and those who hear. Then, there is also signed English, which is labourous to use. There was ASL - American Sign Language, which most English-speaking deaf persons would learn and use among themselves, and incorporate some lip-reading and speaking to facilitate their integration with the hearing society. Then there is Contact Signing, which is what most hearing people would learn and use with the deaf. And finally, signed English, as spoken of before.
So Contact Signing was basically what I needed to learn and learn fast, so that I could enjoy it and build up confidence to use it, with minimal preparatory practice. (There is in fact no one I can do that with, for now.) Investigating this edition of the Idiot's Guide further completely surprised me! I found that I like the way the pictures and context were laid out and the invaluable bits to note - such as what was possibly not polite or useful practices when signing with a deaf person, or things simply "not to do". After just three days of gobbling up the pages and skipping the more sophicated signs which would need a DVD or check on YouTube.com to verify the flow of motion for the gestures, I felt I knew quite a bit. Then I added up what I saw on the music video and the show. To my surprise, when watching the series catch-up and the video, I picked up nuances in the way the actors signed, which I missed before, or could not have known just from the static pictures. The difference was the intensity of their signs, which added emotion and emphasis to what they were saying. Also, signing as I knew it well now, is not the same as conversational English. That idea alone, allowed me to make much fuller sense of what I was learning in "signing" because I did not allow the English syntax and grammar rules to interfere with what I needed to say or expected to "read"/"see" signed to me.
I am still at an infancy stage, and like all beginners in any language, will be more prepared to express myself in a limited way then to understand immediately what is expressed to me in sign.
But I will practice by watching all the available content on TV or the Internet or DVD as I can, to load my my familiarity with this new language. Just a few nights ago, I reviewed the Idiot's Guide before I slept, and exhausted from taking in more and more "signs", I fell asleep. I found myself suddenly awake at 3 am, with my hands signing automatically in the air. That was a real joy to me. So, I made a contract with myself to practice and master the basics of Contact Signing, and to be unafraid to try it with the next deaf person I encounter, who would be happy to accommodate my new found appreciation for signing my dialogue with me. So, I posted some notes of thanks to Sean Berdy on his Twitter and Facebook pages, because his appearance and craft as an actor, and being a deaf performer, simply helped me lose myself in this new frontier of learning and being.
