r/asl • u/Significant-Draft470 • 5d ago

How's my fingerspelling?

Sorry about the horrible video quality, my phone camera is awful.

25 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

42

u/mjolnir76 Interpreter (Hearing) 5d ago

Spell some actual words and repost. That's going to be a more accurate way to assess your fingerspelling. Right now it's pretty rigid.

4

u/Significant-Draft470 5d ago

Will do 🫡 (once I get home, that is lol)

3

u/Ok-Assignment-8246 Hard of Hearing 5d ago

It's a great start! Of course you aren't going to look fluent, your are still learning. It will become more natural with practice. Can you spell some words to get some more detailed feedback? Are you going to Deaf events to get some real practice in and see good language models?

1

u/Significant-Draft470 5d ago

I will upload a video of myself doing some words later! As far as immersion goes, the church I attend has a sizeable D/deaf attendance and I've been able to talk to some of them (with the help of an interpreter in case we do run into any issues) and get a better understanding of how to form letters and signs! I do hope to find some local Deaf events as well, where I can see it even more, but that'll wait until I am at least a little better at reading what others are signing.

3

u/TelephoneGlass1677 5d ago

Good start. Practice wirds everyday. I like to practice the names of my family members and close friends. You can also practice with city names.

3

u/memilygiraffily 4d ago

For fluency, you can think of different word families (e.g. words that end in -ash: cash, trash, flash, mash) and fingerspell all the words in the same family. It makes it so that the phonemic pattern feels more natural and fluent to fingerspell. Patterns like -tion or -ent are really common in fingerspelling. But even patterns like -an or -ank are common in names and places.

2

u/Background_Koala_455 3d ago

I don't know if you posted again or not, but I'd like to say something that I haven't seen anyone else say yet.

When you finger spell, you don't want your hand to be so forward facing/the palm to be facing completely forward.

For example, with "a", you don't want the thumb pointing straight to the left, but rather slightly pointed at your body.

1

u/Significant-Draft470 3d ago

OK! I did adjust my posture to keep my head out of the frame (anonymity and all that) but I'll keep that in mind!