ASL crash course

[4KookieKids]

I know there are lots of posts about learning ASL, and I'm not saying they're not good, and I also don't want to minimize the complexity of deaf culture, but I am looking for a crash course for ASL to get my family basic conversational skills as quickly as possible. We have unexpectedly found ourselves in a situation where we are interacting with a deaf family on a regular basis, and we cannot find an interpreter (we live in a super rural area), and writing notes on paper is extremely cumbersome. If we were willing to devote 1-2 weeks of doing it full-time in our homeschool, could you recommend something for this? We will do it slow and "right" in time - just looking for a jump start!

[HomeAgain]

I like Lifeprint (online) or Signing Naturally (book and dvd- older editions are just as good as the new)
Both of them are centered on conversations, but Lifeprint is more natural feeling and has additional helps. https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/lessons/lesson01.htm

 

Adding: taking time to go through the alphabet signs more phonetically is a huge help.  It's hard to read finger-spelling, give it a letter name, and then 'translate' that to phonetic speech that makes sense in your head as a hearing person.  Practice reading each others' finger spellings phonetically to give you a quick boost.

Edited April 25, 2021 by HomeAgain

[kristin0713]

Lifeprint is good. Bill Vicars also has a YouTube channel, he’s great https://m.youtube.com/user/billvicars 

You might want to look for a deaf tutor online as well or a class from outschool. Definitely a Deaf person if you can one.  
 

I agree with practicing fingerspelling as much as you can. A super long time ago, I used a computer program that drilled receptive and expressive fingerspelling and it was really great practice. I’m sure there’s an app these days.