WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONVERSATIONAL SIGN LANGUAGE AND AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE?
American Sign Language is a full, vibrant, foreign language with no association with English. It has its own sentence structure, grammar, syntax, and much more. If you're interested in learning Sign Language because you want to become a professional interpreter or you're a homeschool student wanting to learn ASL as a foreign language credit at most colleges and universities, this class would be the better class for you. We work with an excellent curriculum and the class is challenging, with a book report and video required. This is for the most serious student.
However, if you are just wanting to learn Sign Language because it looks neat or you want to converse with deaf people in a general way, it isn't necessary to learn the foreign language of ASL. You can learn something called Contact Sign (formerly known as Pidgin Sign English). That means that you learn true ASL signs (we don't teach Signed English since adult Deaf do not use it), but you sign them in English word order. This is what our Conversational Sign classes do. We supply the workbook for this class. It's a lot of fun!
If you're not sure which one best suits you, we would probably recommend starting with Conversational Sign Language. But please, send us an email if you're not sure.
We hope that helps clear things up.
To contact us with questions or to sign up for an event, email Michele at DeafExpressions05@gmail.com or send a TEXT to (616) 516-6314.
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