Looking Out To Sea

Saw this when we were at Sarah’s house on Sunday — an advert raising awareness of global warming, in British Sign Language.

There’s something unnatural about the signing that’s hard to get past though. Maybe it’s the lack of facial expression, which is very unusual. Thoughts? I haven’t been able to find any more information about the video other than the advertising company behind it.

That’s it, finished. I have now passed the SQA course for British Sign Language Level 2. This makes it seem much more like a qualification than I have considered it to be. It has been nice in the past to get the certificate (when it eventually comes) but the point of it has been learning.

There are several obstacles to taking BSL 3. Cost (£2000 per year for two years) and location (college/university) are important, as well as the fact that I don’t really feel capable of it. I think a lot of people lost motivation over the year. Mostly I’ve improved but there has been a significant degree of backsliding too.

What now? We have neither the time nor the money to devote to the next level, so it seems this is where we have to stop. We need some time to practise regularly to keep the skills fresh. Facebook has a Sign Edinburgh group, for monthly practice sessions, which seems to be dormant at the moment. I’ve been trying to get a reaction from the current members without luck.

I hope we’ll be able to maintain contact with a few of the people from class as well. If all else fails we can just form our own drinking signing group. Tuesdays from now on will be a little duller without it all.

With slightly more immediate effect, we can start watching signed television again, on BBC iPlayer. This is great news for — watching real television shows (rather than the talking-heads stuff we used in class) is much more interesting.

Check out the fun time I had cooking burger and fries from Nigella Express. You should try the chips recipe, it’s great fun. You get a freezer bag and put a bunch of new potatoes inside. Then you get a rolling pin and beat the crap out of the little blighters. And then when they’re little chunks — or when you’re tired, whichever comes first — you fry ‘em up. She suggests shallow fry but I think a deep fry would be give a crisper, more golden finish.

Getting nice new potatoes is probably quite important too. The only ones I could get in Somerfield were a bit tired.

I had a deep philosophical conversation with Martin earlier and came to the conclusion that the green Eee was the way to go. (Thanks for the encouragement Calum; you’re still invited for Nigella-food some time!) So I ordered it, and hope to get it within a week. (Finding somewhere that stocked it was harder than I expected.)

Meanwhile, I have to think up, practise, and then record, a ~3 minute presentation for my next BSL assessment. I hate these things where you have talk about your hobby or whatever because I never know what to say. I had this paralysis in school with French essays and it hasn’t really got any easier. Must get thinking…

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.

I’ve got to record what we did this week at BSL because Helen wasn’t there. And we’ve got homework so I thought I’d write it here so it’s easy to access.

Describing people and animals

We followed on from the previous week, doing more description of animals first, then of people after the break. It’s still really hard to picture what is distinctive about people. Same with animals — there’s always something that’s really stereotypical or indicative but it’s hard to come up with. Last week I was trying to describe a wolf but completely forgot about the “howling at the moon” behaviour, so nobody knew what I was talking about.

This week I managed to convey a goat pretty well, but it’s easier because not many animals butt heads and have long beards. That’s really goatish. I then elected to describe Johnny Rotten, which I thought would be pretty straight-forward. The first guess was Sid Vicious! Meh.

Still pretty difficult to describe without using topic words: to say “23” instead of “age 23” or “blonde” instead of “hair blonde”. It’s the same mindset that has people prefixing every sentence by pointing to themselves. In other words, English grammar.

Holiday

We spent the majority of the lesson covering arrangements for holidays — stuff you need to have, stuff you need to do, that kind of thing. Most of it airport-based, I suppose because it has the most scope for distinctive vocabulary. People use trains to get to work, but departure lounges and x-ray scanners are not day-to-day things.

Let me see, there was “waiting” and “queue” and “lounge” and “complain” and “argument”. You can tell we’ve all been to airports before, right? And “late” but also “early”, “sunglasses” and “midge repellent” and the names of a bunch of different countries.

The sign for Hawaii is good, because it’s like a little grass-skirted hula dance. For the record, Scotland is a stylised bagpipe sign, a sort of one-armed chicken flap. This is apparently called metonymy — referring to one thing by describing something that is related to it. English has this when we talk about “the crown” to mean the monarchy. This happens loads in sign language and is one of the things I really enjoy about it. Some of the examples I’ve seen have been very enlightening and evocative (though naturally I can’t think of any right now).

Homework

For next week we’ve to come up with a two-minute story describing “setting off on holiday”. Everything to the point where the plane takes off, except the decision-making process which is boring. So: packing, readying the house (cancelling milk, etc.), getting money/insurance, leaving for the airport. That should be more than enough for two minutes of presentation.

In Guns, Germs and Steel (a very interesting though eventually quite repetitive book), Jared Diamond tells of a native American who invented an alphabet for his own tongue, after seeing how the Europeans gained such power and expression from their written words. The story (as I remember it) is that he got a sample of the alphabet we used and started assigning sounds from his own language. When he reached the limit of the borrowed glyphs, he started to invent new ones.

It seems odd that people think of the alphabet we use in this country as ‘the English alphabet’ when it so poorly suited to the English language. So many sounds we make in English are not catered for — we must use combinations like ‘sh’ or ‘th’ or ‘ch’ to make up for the shortfall Over the centuries we’ve even lost letters that used to do some of these jobs. Even if we consider the stand-ins as single letters rather than pairs, there are so many odd exceptions and disparities between spoken and written English. Would you guess ‘onion’ is actually pronounced more like ‘union’ looks, which itself is actually pronounced more like ‘yoonyin’? (But then, you’ll probably disagree completely because your accent is so different from mine.)

There is an interesting article about the effect of this arbitrary mapping of sound to symbol. The awkwardness of the English language in this regard is contrasted with reading in Germany and Austria, with terrifying results:

Some children in countries with transparent alphabets do have reading problems, but these have to do with fluency and comprehension. Yet even this is relative. Normal readers from Salzburg were compared to normal readers from London on tests of reading accuracy and speed. Seven year-olds from Salzburg read as fast as the 9 year olds from London, making half the number of errors. The Austrian 7 year-olds had one year of reading instruction, the English 9 year-olds, four or five.

There seems to be a long history of attempted spelling reform for the English language, with limited success. The American dictionary compilers have obviously had the most success, though all they’ve really done is entrench differences in pronunciation. There is a big difference between ‘mum’ and ‘mom’, after all.

I started along this track after reading complaints from BSL users about using the English alphabet. BSL reduced to written words removes all the subtlety and all the power from the language. But then, it does that to most spoken English as well. I wonder if the American fellow mentioned above, who invented his own alphabet to suit his own way of speaking, felt the same?

Last night’s sign language was an optional extra lesson, to make up for the one we all missed when the Deaf Action building suffered heating loss on a particularly bitter November day. We didn’t do anything particularly challenging — some random bits of conversation about Christmas shopping and holiday plans, and a bit of descriptive work (describing the layout of rooms) which we were supposed to have been practising but, inevitably, had not done.

It wasn’t all earnest work though. We all bunked off early to go to the pub (including our tutors). Knowing how to sign in a noisy pub is incredibly useful. Seriously, if I don’t ever use it again, being able to communicate with people in a noisy environment is a big plus. (I find it quite frustrating that other people don’t know BSL. In fact, I’m sure people must think I just wave my hands around a lot when I’m speaking. But that’s their loss, frankly.) I found out that this blog has two (only two?) lurkers. So, hello Emma and Emily.

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Every so often when I’ve been learning sign language I feel like suddenly something clicks and I’m noticeably more competent than I was before. It’s like climbing a sheer cliff and finding a little shelf, wide enough to sit on and take stock of the view and realise how far you’ve come. I don’t know if there’s ever a reason for this sudden jump in (apparent) competence — maybe doing a little bit more practice, or thinking a bit deeper? Who knows.

But whatever the reason, yesterday I felt like I’d just made another little plateau. I was signing direction and placement and handshape exactly as I’ve always wanted, but with less hesitation and more fluency than I had ever had in the past.

All that said, I was probably still pretty rubbish. But it felt better, which was nice.

On Monday night we sat in and watched four segments of a video of signed stories. I don’t know how many there are in total, but four was enough for one night. The clips have an audio commentary which we muted the first few times, then we checked with the sound up. One clip was so hard we couldn’t see all the signs even when (a) we knew what was being said (b) we’d watched it through a few times anyway and (c) it was playing at half speed.

It doesn’t make you feel so virtuous for practising if you sucked monumentally when you did!

But the results of the first assessment came through yesterday. I got a “well done” and ticks in all the right columns, so I’m pretty happy. I had an inkling that the ‘actual’ performance in my test was the best I’d done, but it’s hard to be self-critical when you’re also concentrating on not losing your thread and staring blankly at the video recorder.

Another sign language lesson out the way. I had completely forgotten there was homework (and was still a bit fuzzy on the purpose anyway) but no-one else had done it either. The first assessment is next week. I’m not so worried now about content, but I’m still a bit iffy on length. It’s meant to be 3–5 minutes but I’m struggling to break through the 2½ minute mark right now. As with all presentations, it’s a combination of not being sure what’s relevant, or what’s interesting, and going too darn fast.

Regarding homework, my boss was good enough to transfer a video of signed stories over to DVD. I haven’t checked the quality yet, but we don’t have a VHS player at all so it’s still a massive improvement. I might stick it on my computer and cut it up into little bite-sized chunks; that’ll make for easier viewing.

After class a few of us went to the pub. A place called The Street, which I can’t find a URL for anywhere — but with a name as search-unfriendly as that, are you surprised? I wore my nifty black fedora and got a lot of compliments, so that was nice. But I’m pretty exhausted today, so I’m going to call it a night.