Sign Language Vocabulary

A big part of learning a language is, of course, learning new words. In order to do so many students keep glossaries, buy vocabulary learning books and tons of different dictionaries, like collocation dictionaries, monolingual dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries, phrasal verbs dictionaries etc. Obviously there are many words to gain and there are many ways to store them, but we are speaking here about spoken languages. How would you store signed words? That’s one of the frequently asked questions Sign Language students hear, so I thought why not answer it here and share my experiences with you, my language-interested fellow students.

Let’s start with the question of learning new words. Learning Sign Language words is a rather time-consuming process. Our teacher, a native speaker, prepares a vocabulary list with all the new expressions. He hands out these lists of German words and expressions and then signs each one, pausing after every word for us to write the it down. Now you’ll probably ask: How would you write down a signed word? I’ll give you an example: Here you can watch the Styrian sign for “April”. (By the way, the person on the viedo is one of the teachers at our department) I wrote the sign down like this:




As you can see I use a lot of abbreviation, describing exactly where the hand is, where it goes and how this movement looks like. Of course, everybody has his/her own system to remember the words. For example, better equipped students might film themselves signing, drawing talents might put down the word this way… It really doesn’t matter as long as you remember the word accurately, since small changes could change the word's meaning. Also, the facial expression needs to be remembered, especially the mouth gesture. Although in most cases the mouth forms soundlessly the German word, there are also words and expressions that require a special mouth gesture.

Ok, that’s it for now… Much as I’d love to tell you more about this wonderful language, I’m too tired right now.

See you tomorrow…