As of this past weekend, I finished up the ASL course I was taking through the Durham County Library. I highly recommend this course if you want an introduction to ASL and the Deaf community. It is completely virtual and there is a fair amount of time to complete modules at a reasonable pace. In the last three modules, I learned various signs for feelings, personality traits, clothing, hairstyles, food, and animals, as well as about classifiers, non-manual markers, and baby signs (we will revisit baby signs in the next unit).
I think that learning ASL has been a valuable experience for me because I was able to learn about another language and culture within the US but outside of my own community of hearing people. This was also the first language I have tried to learn since starting to learn Latin in 4th grade. While I don’t plan to take any more ASL courses at the moment, I would be open to continuing my studies of this language given the opportunity at a later time. I think that learning a different language with a dissimilar set of grammatical rules will help me understand concepts during my second unit, which focuses on linguistics (i.e. the study of human language as a whole).
