Hello everybody, this is Chris, I just wanted to put out a video real quick
just to give you some updates to what you can look forward to in the month of
March and also beyond. Before I get into that, I just want to thank each and every
one of you that have been watching my videos and that have taken upon yourself
to learn sign language. It's really encouraging to hear all of your stories
about how you're progressing with the language and really what it's enabling
you to do, to communicate with your family, to communicate with clients, to
communicate just with the deaf community in general, so I'm really excited that so
many of you are finding success and learning the language and it's really
nice to hear the feedback from you as well. I just got a comment from Lisa in
regards to the 100 signs video that I put out a couple months ago and she
reached out to me and wanted to thank me for creating those videos. I really do
appreciate hearing that kind of feedback as well I also really want to give
thanks to everybody that has been able to support me via Patreon, I'm creating
these videos, these lessons, and engaging with everybody on social media ... at this
point it is really a a passion project and everybody that has been able to support
me via Patreon has really helped me continue to keep the ball rolling and to
be able to continue to create these lessons and videos and continue to
hopefully make courses in the near future, because really it is a labor of
love at this point, you know a 5 minute video could take up to 5 hours
by the time you script and curriculum plan, shoot the video, edit the
video, do all the closed captions, that's something I do manually at this point, so
it is a very time-consuming process. So for everybody that has been very
encouraging and for those that have been directly supporting me, I really want to
thank each and every one of you, and also I do want to let you know of a couple
things that are coming out. One thing that I'm going to be posting on Patreon
is going to be a series of high frequency word videos, and so this is
something I'm really excited about because you can actually attain fluency
really quickly if you nail down the right high frequency words.
There's a linguist from New Zealand that has this whole TED talk about how you
can learn any language in six months. You may not be a hundred percent fluent
or you might not be a native speaker but you can become sufficient in a
language in that time period if you learn the right, if you learn the
right words. So in his TED talk, maybe I'll link it up to the in the card
above or in the link description below, but basically if you learn about a
thousand high-frequency words in any language then you are able to attain by
80% fluency in that language. If you learn I think it to three thousand that
bumps up to like 98% fluency, and that's really exciting for me to produce and to
be able to help really catapult others learning. So that's going to be a video I'm
going to post on Patreon and will be available to all tier levels and I
should have the first episode ready and coming in a week or two. So that's something
to keep an eye out for, also on Patreon I am going to be
expanding group practice sessions, I'm going to try to do more than one a month
and depending on whether or not you want to have a little more of a
class environment or if you want it to just be practice, because one of the
things that I've been hearing again and again is "I'm currently learning sign
language but I don't have anybody to practice with", so that's something that
I'm working to provide, trying to connect language learners of similar skill
levels so they can get in that practice if they don't have people locally to
practice with. So that is also available on Patreon and another thing is that I
do accept one-on-one tutoring, so if that's something you're interested in
go ahead and check out, I do only have limited spacing because as of right
now I am working full time as an interpreter, so I'm doing that about 50
hours a week and I'm doing all this on the side, so as of right now I could
probably only accept five students, but if that's something that you're
interested in please let me know. You can shoot me an email at chris@aslbasics.com
or you can check out patreon.com/aslbasics.com
for availability. Oh another thing is that we're having a
local deaf event if you happen to live in the Central Valley of California, the
company that both my wife and I work for is hosting a deaf event this coming Friday
at Me-N-Eds Pizza in the city of Visalia. If you're in the neighborhood,
everybody is welcome whether you're hearing or deaf or hard-of-hearing or a
student or a teacher, a professor, if you want to come you're more than
welcome to, so those are really great events. I do plan on shooting a video
about attending deaf events and also some tips on how to get the most out of
them, to you know, come out of your comfort zone and try to force yourself
to use the language that you've learned. So that will also be in the future,
coming in the next week or two hopefully. And one last thing that I'm pretty
excited about is that I'm going to be working with The Language Mindset, if you
haven't heard of her, she's on Instagram and she's going to be putting together a
special episode of her podcast, the podcast is called The Language Mindset
as well and she teaches English and Italian and a couple other languages,
it's a really interesting podcast, but she's getting teachers from around the
globe to put their input on language learning and how to get the most out of
it and how to pick up that language the quickest, so I'm actually going to be on
that podcast and something I really look forward to, and I know language fluency
is something that we're all attaining and it's something that we want to just
get there in as little time as possible, and that's really what that podcast is
going to address is learning tips and advice and how to speed up that process
and we're going to be hearing from teachers and polyglots and it's going to
be really interesting, so I look forward to that doing that and I look forward to
sharing that with all of you so that's mostly what's going to be happening in
March. Again if you have any questions or if you're interested in checking out
group practice sessions or if you're interested in doing one-on-one tutoring
please let me know in the in the comments down below or you
can contact me directly at chris@aslbasics.com, and another thing is you may
have noticed is that I've been posting links to Skillshare in the descriptions
in the description area below the videos, that's something that I'm actually
really excited about because a lot of what I've learned in order to, you know,
do the channel and grow my social media and video editing and a lot of other
stuff like photography and cinematography, composition, a lot of that
stuff I've learned through Skillshare and I reached out to them and I was able
to have them provide me with a link that will get anybody 2 months worth of
their premium access, which gives you access to, I want to say it's up to
15,000 different classes right now, but there's a lot of cool classes
on there ... there's one on ASL, there's one on learning language as an adult,
there's ones that are more tuned to business and creativity, writing, but
anyways, if you want to go check that out I'm going to leave the link in
the description down below, but anyways, I just wanted to share all that with you I
look forward to creating this content and continue to look forward to seeing
all of you progress in the language, it's really exciting to see and really
what that progress has enabled everybody to do and the people
you're able to connect with and communicate with, so I want to thank
everybody once again and until next time I'll see you later! Bye.