Some Notes on Sign Languages

About

These are some of my personal notes on sign languages. Mostly American Sign Language (ASL). Don’t use this to learn ASL. I’m wrong all the time! And this website is meant only for me, not the public. There are lots of Deaf ASL teachers around. Learn from someone qualified like them, please.

I’m using Fredrick Brennan’s TT2020 typeface.

My Notes

• Hawaiʻi Sign Language: Brief Notes
• Protactile American Sign Language: Brief Notes
• Sign Languages: Resources

Motivation

I like ASL a lot but I’m not very good at it. I’m hoping that keeping these notes will help me learn it better. I also have pencil-and-paper notes, but digital notes like these let me do things like link to videos.

Originally this was a vocab list. I kept forgetting words. Unfortunately I’m slow and it would take me literal days to transcribe the words and their structure, so I stopped doing that. Probably wasn’t helping too much anyway. I also read a bunch of books about ASL and wanted to keep track. And I wanted to be able to easily access the document on multiple devices. So: website!

I make a lot of mistakes and I’m wrong a lot, so hopefully this will help me keep track of those, too.