The one thing I've always found hard about ASL was my inability to write down and record the signs that I've learned, unlike other languages like Spanish or Chinese, where I can keep multiple journals of vocabulary that I can always look back on.
However, after a bit of some creativity, I think I've found a way to get around this barrier and it's actually remarkably simple- I call it my "digital ASL journal". This digital storage of all the signs I learned is so incredibly helpful for my learning process. I hope that this post will help you as much as it's helped me improve so much in my ASL journey!
~So how exactly do you create a digital ASL vocab journal?~
Following my ASL learning routine, after completing an ASL lesson by Bill Vscar, I will open up my Notion page, which is a digital platform for organization and note-taking that I highly recommend everyone to check out. If you don't have Notion, you can use Google Docs, for example, or any other digital notepad.
I have a page for each lesson and I type out a shortlist of all the words I remember learning (for active recall). If I miss anything, I will either look through the video or click on his website and look through the vocab he has listed for each lesson.
Then, if I can, I will try to use words to describe each sign. For example, for the word "dad", I will type in italics next to the word: Spread 5 fingers like signaling the number 5 and tap the end of thumb to forehead using dominant hand to try and describe the sign. As another example, for the word
If you need help with thinking of ways to describe the sign, a great resource I recommend is "BabySignLanguage.Com"
If not, I take a screenshot from the video of the sign and copy and paste it to my Notion page (this may sound tedious at first, but after you get in the habit of doing so, it takes like 5 seconds. For a shortcut on the keyboard, you can do control shift s to take a screenshot) Also, you can search up any sign online like "bread in asl" and get hundreds of google images.
As an example, this is what my notion page looks like:
(all of the images are directly screenshot from Google)
Thanks for reading and hopefully you found this helpful! Make sure to sign up for my newsletter and share this post with any friends!
~Claire
😁