Amy and I just returned from our first ASL class at the local community centre. We decided to sign up for this class mostly because we though it would be interesting to learn. Communicating silently between ourselves will be fun too! And who knows, it might come in handy in a practical situation one day.

It was a little bit of a surprise (though it probably shouldn't have been) that our teacher is deaf. She can hear a little bit (was complaining about the loud music in the aerobics class next door), and can speak well enough (though I suspect she prefers not to), but for almost the entire class she did not say anything out loud. She wrote quite a few things on the whiteboard, mostly instructions about what we were going to do next, but the whole class was pretty much an immersion. I found this style very comfortable when learning signing.

So far we have learned the "fingerspelling" alphabet, the numbers from 0 to 15, and a good handful of 30 or so additional concepts and emotions. It's really encouraging to be able to learn so much in the first two hours!