Looking Out To Sea

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.