American Sign Language For Dummies. Penilla Adan R.

easily get lost trying to understand this method. The best way to follow what these signers are expressing is to watch their mouth movement and read their lips. You may not catch most of what’s said, but if you do some lip-reading, remember the topic, and ask for clarification, you’ll get by.

      

You sign, rather than fingerspell, some initializations – concepts such as a. m. and p. m., which you sign as morning and evening, respectively. But you can fingerspell a word like okay as O-K, or you can just show the F handshape. Yes, it’s a gesture, but it gets the point across. Remember, all languages use gestures, and ASL is no different.

      You may run across compound names that are abbreviated as two letters: Los Angeles (LA), San Francisco (SF), Burger King (BK), and Blue Ridge (BR). Remember to fingerspell the complete word before you abbreviate it, because L-A could mean Louisiana and B-R could mean Baton Rouge. The goal is to be clear; shortcuts and slang will come, so don’t get ahead of yourself.

Shaping up those hands

      Remembering a few simple points can help you make handshapes like a lifelong signer. Handshapes are hand formations that you use to sign each letter of the alphabet; this is also called the manual alphabet. Your manual dexterity is like a voice that has the ability to sing, and it requires practice. Start with two-letter words and graduate to larger ones. As you start getting the feel for fingerspelling, you’ll be using hand muscles that you didn’t know you had, so you may notice a little soreness.

      

Handshapes are the individual letters of the manual alphabet, and fingerspelling is an action using the manual alphabet to create words.

      

In your excitement to sign, you face the possibility of overusing your hands. Like that singing voice, your hands need a little break as they get ready for the next step. To find out how to keep your hands limber, search for “hand exercises” on the Internet or talk to sign language interpreters.

      In the rest of this section, we explain the basic conventions of handshapes.

      

For signing purposes, the hand you write with is called your dominant hand (some folks call it the active hand). The other hand is your base hand or passive hand. In this book, all the illustrations represent a right-handed signer – the right hand illustrates the dominant hand, and the left hand illustrates the passive hand. So, in a nutshell, if you see a sign with the right hand dominant and you’re left-handed, use your left hand.

      While your active hand does the work, your passive hand does one of the following:

      ❯❯ It mirrors the active hand.

      ❯❯ It displays one of seven basic handshapes, called natural handshapes.

      The seven natural handshapes are the letters A, B, C, S, and O and the numbers 1 and 5.

If you don’t use your passive hand for these handshapes, you’ll be breaking a rule in ASL. The Deaf person who is watching you sign may not know this particular rule, but they’ll be thrown off. Therefore, follow this basic rule and stay ahead of the game.

      You can use natural handshapes in a variety of ways. You may form the same handshape in one direction for a particular sign but in a different direction for another sign. For a sign such as start, you form the natural handshape (in this case, the number 5) in one direction. But for a sign such as cook, you form that same natural handshape in a different direction. Check out the following examples of active/passive handshapes that you use while signing:

      When your passive hand mirrors the shape of your dominant hand, you move both hands either together or alternately. If moving them alternately, you move both hands in alternate directions at the same time. Here are some examples of alternating handshapes:

Benefiting with body language

      Communicating a concept in Sign is often made clear by using body language. The meaning of I don’t know comes through clearly when you raise your shoulders, tilt your head, and turn your palm up. Signing I’m sick is more easily understood when you accompany the sign with half-shut eyes, an open mouth, and a partially extended tongue. Another example is the word no. The speed at which you shake your head from side to side, with eyes open or shut, can say a lot about the degree of no. Quick, short body movements show an emphatic message; an exaggeratedly slow motion with an exaggerated facial expression conveys a similar message. In a word, the speed of the sign displays various tones. Check out the illustrations of these signs to see what we mean:

Gazing at the face of expression

      In Sign, you use your face to show emotion and add expression. Facial expressions tell you how the signer feels about the information he’s signing. Your facial expression is just as important as your hand movements. Without the correct facial expression, the person watching you sign will either get the wrong message or need clarification to make sure that he understands your message correctly.

      Don’t be alarmed if you aren’t understood, even if a Deaf person asks for clarification a couple of times for the same sentence. This means the person genuinely wants to understand what you mean, and it also affords you the opportunity to learn to express your thoughts by Deaf standards. This is an invaluable way of learning; don’t shy away from this experience.