- Welcome back to my channel
the best place for new signers,
intermediate signers and struggling signers.
In today's video I'm gonna help you become more confident
and more accurate in your signing.
So if you're looking for help
to make sure you're signing correctly
without bugging every signer you know ad nauseum
definitely keep watching.
I know you wanna be a good signer.
You wanna be accurate and you wanna be confident,
aka, you don't wanna worry
and think that you're doing it wrong.
So you're watching ASL videos,
you're downloading ASL apps,
you're reading ASL dictionaries,
you're practicing the signs.
Then maybe a few months down the road,
you find out you were doing a lot of those signs incorrectly
or maybe you get the feedback faster
that you're still doing those signs incorrectly.
Or maybe you're lucky enough
that you don't have to wait several months
to find out you're doing it wrong
but you find out right away that you learned the sign
you thought you understood it,
you thought you were doing it right,
but come to find out you're doing it wrong.
And that doesn't feel good at all.
Now you're sitting there full of self doubt.
You're discouraged.
You probably feel like garbage.
You're definitely not gonna go out
and sign with other people because you're like,
I'm not gonna go and make a fool of myself,
I'm not gonna go up there
and sign something horribly offensive
when I only wanted to talk about my cat fluffy.
You may very well be thinking,
oh I'm never gonna get this right.
I've learned and I've learned
and I've studied and I've practiced
what the heck is wrong with me?
I must not be cut out for this and you give up.
I understand how frustrating
and upsetting this can be for you.
You're putting forth all this effort
and you're not getting what you want out of it.
I know that's frustrating.
I've had similar situations
with other things I've been pursuing in my life
and I'm just like, I'm trying, I'm working hard.
I'm doing the things, but I'm not seeing the results I want.
And of course you wanna give up.
Of course you think you're the variable that's the problem.
You're not the problem.
Let's talk about it.
If you really pay attention
to what I'm saying today in this video,
it's gonna serve you for years to come, okay?
So please promise me that you will at least give this
a watch and a go and a try, okay?
'Cause I'm not just saying this just to make a video.
I'm actually like, this is the problem,
let me help you fix it because I care, I care.
I don't want another ASL student giving up
'cause that just breaks my dang heart.
Please promise me you'll pay attention and try this out
and let me know how it goes for you.
The common mistakes that I see
in signs being done incorrectly are hand shapes.
The hand shapes are the shape your hand is in
when you sign a sign.
Every single sign has hand shapes.
It could be one handed,
it could be two handed
and it could start in one hand shape
and end in another hand shape, all right?
The most common mistake I see
is the hand shape is incorrect.
The next common mistake is your hand is in the wrong spot.
Maybe you're signing silver
and you put your hand here rather than
where it belongs here in front of your ear.
So it's just the location.
The other one is your palm orientation.
Maybe you've got the hand shape right,
maybe you've got the location right
but your palm is facing the wrong direction.
So if I'm signing, thank you
but I signed it like this, that is incorrect.
So your palm orientation
is the direction your palm is facing.
You need that to be in the right spot.
The one is not as common,
but it still can happen is the movement.
Some signs are static, some signs have movement.
And so sometimes the movement is wrong.
Maybe the movement is going in the wrong direction
or maybe the movements too big or too small.
Maybe it's only supposed to be done once
and you do it two or three times,
that kind of a thing.
And the last one is any non-manual markers.
Sometimes a sign requires you to do a mouth morphing,
a shape with your mouth or an expression with your face.
Not all of them do, but some of them do.
And so that would be just missing that
like not even knowing that you have to do that
or doing it incorrectly.
But again, the most three common that you're gonna see
are hand shape, location and palm orientation.
If you didn't know
these are the five parameters of sign language.
Every single sign has hand shape,
a location, a movement, a palm orientation
and then some signs have non-manual markers.
What I was talking about,
something that's not done with your hand
but it's part of the sign.
So every single sign is having
which has these four parameters, right?
These are the ones you need to know
every single sign about, all right.
So this is really good because it gives you
almost a mathematical approach to learning the signs.
So I'm gonna give you some tips
on how you can become more aware of this
so that you can correct those mistakes.
You can either prevent the mistakes from happening
or check yourself and correct them right away
so that you're not building a bad habit of signing,
you know, sister or one way
when you're actually supposed to be signing it
completely different.
We don't wanna build those habits,
those bad habits or build up new muscle memory
because then it's just a little bit harder to correct,
it'll take more time and attention to correct.
And if you have a lot of signs
that's a lot of work and that can be very discouraging.
So this is gonna help you learn it the right way
and second of all it's gonna help you correct any mistakes
because we all make mistakes, okay?
It's not a big deal, but let's correct them faster.
Here are the three things I want you to take into account
when you are learning new signs
or if you have to go back over signs
that you know you've done incorrectly.
Number one, receptive learning is king.
I have a whole video of this.
I could go on and on and on for days and days
and make up a jillion videos about it
and it'll still won't be enough.
Check out the video up here somewhere
and I'll also link it down below.
Receptive is king, put your hands in your lap,
sit on them, don't use them
when you're learning the signs the first time,
learn with your eyeballs.
Suck it in this approach.
You want to approach learning each sign
as if you were the best CSI investigator in the dang world.
I don't want you to sit back and be like,
oh that's a great sign, I really like it, it's cute.
It makes sense, I get it, I know it.
No sir, no ma'am, you are a CSI investigator.
You aren't passively watching signs
go by your cute little face.
You are watching and you are paying attention.
You are soaking in whole of those details.
You're seeing every little thing that that person is doing.
What are you noticing?
Those parameters that I talked about.
Hand shape, location, palm orientation, movement
and any non-manual markers that are happening.
Now let's get to the tips of how you can do this better.
If you're watching a video, slow down that video,
put it on the slowest speed you can
and take notes, write it down.
What are you seeing?
What's that hand shape?
Are there two hand shapes or one hand shape?
Does it start one hand shape
and move to the next hand shape?
All right, you got that down.
Rewind it, let's start it again.
Where are those hands located?
Okay, good, you've got it.
Does it start in one spot and in another.
Write as many words as you need to, to really understand it.
You may not have to refer back to these notes ever again
but if you're writing it down yourself,
hand on a piece of paper,
it's really gonna help cement it in your brain
as part of a learning process.
And you can draw a little stick figure and say,
oh, look this is kind of what it looks like.
And you can do the same thing
if you looking at a sign in a gif
or if you're looking at a dictionary.
Just look at the dictionary and write those things down.
And it'll be nice because you don't have to pause
or rewind anything,
it's just right there for you.
So super easy, super fast
but just make sure you're paying attention
to all those things.
The more you do this it's not let's say
you're gonna have to do this for thousands of signs
but if you can do this for the first 400 signs you learn
somewhere around there, 200 signs, whatever
you'll eventually be able to do it just in your mind
and just be like, I got it, I'm seeing it.
It's gonna train your brain
and train your eyes to recognize all of these things.
This is like one of the top things
that I have my ASL accelerated students do.
But I teach in my training retain method
in my ASL accelerated course.
It is one of the biggest aspects
of why they can remember the signs
and why they are signing them correctly
and it's gonna serve you.
So I'm just sharing you a bit
of what I teach my own ASL students.
The other thing you can do is to check and verify.
You know that saying, what is it? Trust, but verify, right?
Trust yourself to get it,
but also verify to make sure that
when you are signing it, expressive signing
that you are doing what they're showing you.
So you can do this a variety of ways.
You could have, pull up if it's a video or a gif or a book.
You can look at yourself in the mirror
with a video there and check, am I doing it correctly?
You can pull out your smartphone or a camera or whatever
your webcam on your computer and record yourself
or just pull it up if you don't wanna record,
but have it so you can see yourself
and sign along with them.
You can go slow or the regular speed, it doesn't matter
and be like, okay, this is what I'm doing,
this is what they're doing.
What do I need?
Is there anything I need to tweak to look more like them?
And you can do that with a picture as well
even if it's a static picture like in a dictionary
or whatever, you can still test make sure
and go through each of those parameters.
Am I the same hand shapes?
Am I the same location?
Palm orientation, movement, non-manual markers,
go through every single one,
not just one, don't look just for the handshake
or just the location because you may miss something else.
When you do this approach,
you're gonna see a lot of things happen.
Number one, you're gonna learn signs faster.
You're gonna become more accurate in your signing.
You're gonna become more confident
because you're gonna be able to trust yourself
to learn the signs as you do.
And you want to have to pester people near as much to
and put your learning and your success
in somebody else's hands.
You're also gonna avoid building bad habits
with incorrect signing.
Because you're not gonna be pestering these people as much
you'll become a more independent learner.
But on the flip side, the really good thing with it
is you're gonna be that much more likely
to go sign with other people,
engage in conversation and communication and connection.
And then because of that,
you'll be able to learn even more
because you'll have develop these rich relationships.
You'll be able to go in there and learn more signs faster
because you've trained your eyes to understand
like to take in, like so you're in a deaf event
and you're signing with somebody
and they sign some signs you haven't learned yet.
You'll be able to learn them more accurately
and remember them because now you have the tools
to recognize all the aspects of the sign
that they just signed to you.
And all of this will add up to you continuing to learn
because you aren't giving up.
You're continuing to learn, improve,
you're gonna reach that goal
and you're gonna make connections and build friendships
and that is perfection.
Real quick, I want you to practice
this here with me right now.
I'm gonna sign two signs for you
and I want you to pull out a piece of paper
and I want you to write down the five parameters
and what each of them are as I sign these signs.
These are two of the signs
that I see people struggle with the most as new signers
and don't struggle with understanding.
If you do this with me
you'll have two signs that you know you're doing correctly.
All right, here we go.
First one is mountain.
The second one is hard.
If you love these tips, be sure to hit the notification bell
because in the next video I'm gonna share with you
one of my absolute favorite ASL dictionaries.
That's going to help you specifically
with these five parameters that we talked about.
So be sure to check that video out when it is released.
And if you wanna practice your new signing skills
on some new signs or maybe some old signs
check out these two videos right here.