Feb 06 2008
Making time to practise
It’s become pretty obvious that we’ve been sliding into a pit of ineptitude with the sign language. Our tutors have certainly noticed. Helen’s losing vocabulary. I completely draw a blank on the simple queries. Where did you go on holiday? is dredged up slowly from the pit of my memory and analysed from all sides, but it still makes no sense.
Our excuse is that we no longer have time to practise, so it just doesn’t happen. There are always things we’d rather be doing. When we lived with our parents it was a nice way to have a private conversation. That’s redundant when you’re the only two people in the house.
The only way to have time, and not fall into the “no time” trap, is to make time. One simple thing that we can do is improve our fingerspelling. We were practically ordered to do it at yesterday’s lesson. (I hasten to add, not just the two of us, but the whole class.)
Last night we spent 15 minutes fingerspelling animals. This morning, 5 minutes fingerspelling breakfast words. We need to keep this up. It also gives us an “easy in”. If we’re already sitting in front of each other signing and spelling to each other, there should be a natural progression to conversational signing too.