because some of my regular study habits just don’t work.
Let me explain.
Lots of people think that those who are good in learning
foreign languages are just talented in it and it comes easily to them. Not so
true. First, language has many components, and being good in some of them may
come along with being terrible at others. For example, I am very good at
understanding and remembering grammar. I am exceptionally good at reading and
guessing words from context. I am reasonably good at pronunciation. But I am
terrible at learning words: it takes me huge time to learn new words, and
without practice I forget them very soon. Of course, also everything that I
just said works for spoken languages, signs are a different story for me.
So, how do I handle learning vocabulary? I compensate for my
limited abilities with good learning strategies. Mostly, for me that means
using Anki. So far it has been the most effective way to learn lots of new
words AND keep them in my memory.
Sign languages are a challenge for me in many ways. My hands
are not flexible enough to make perfect handshapes (there goes “pronunciation”), there are no proper
grammar books for RSL (which I am mostly studying now), so I can’t yet learn
grammar rules just by reading them, and there is not enough exposure to pick
the rules from practice. Also, the problem is that in videos or even in talking
to hearing people Deaf people often use simplified or altered versions of their
language in order to make them closer to spoken languages and easier for us, hearing
people, to understand. So, all this make
learning pretty hard.
But the situation with vocabulary is even harder. First,
dictionaries for RSL are just not good. They don’t have many signs, some of
them do not have a slower video option, mostly there are no explanations, and
often in three different dictionaries you’ll find three different signs for one
word. I encountered this today, for example, looking for the verb “to learn”. My
ideal dictionary would have a video that you could watch normally and in slowmo,
a drawing of the sign, that would help better see the handshape, and a verbal
description of the sign and the examples of usage. Also, I’d love to read about
etimology, but that’s just too cocky of me. So, if I want to learn a specific sign,
I first need to find it in dictionaries, and it’s not always possible. But one
look at the sign would not help me. I need to see and make it a lot in order to
recognize it. And going to different dictionaries every time I forget a word is
just too much work. I tried adding videos to Anki, so that I would be able to
learn signs as I learn words. For some reasons, it did not work, but even if I
find a way, it still means first looking for words, getting videos of them and somehow
downloading these videos, which is a huge amount of work. There are no
ready-made desks of RSL (or any other sign languages except for ASL) for Anki
and for ASL I found two desks featuring fingerspelling alphabet and one small
desk with photos of basic signs. That’s it. So, I really don’t know how I’ll
manage memorizing signs. So far, I’ve been worse at it than at memorizing words
and I can’t find a way around it.
