Learning New Zealand Sign Language has been quite the experience. I never expected that by the end of this I would have any idea how to communicate in sign as well as I do now. Especially since sign language is not like any other language I’ve learned before and I’ve learned so much in 12 weeks. I’ve taken French, Mandarin, Japanese, Indonesian and Spanish and New Zealand Sign Language has been my favourite to learn. I wouldn’t call it easy, but maybe less stressful would be a more appropriate way to describe the experience.

 

Drama was one of my favourite classes in school and communicating in sign is a little like improvisation. You kind of have to act out what you’re trying to say and the more you know, the more natural it becomes. No one judges you if you make mistakes and there’s no pressure to be perfect. Ironically though, I had trouble during this project with my urge to film perfect videos and the first few weeks of learning NZSL we had to film videos during our lab times for NZSL class. Every time I made a mistake I would start over and keep filming over and over again. After a while I remembered that making mistakes is part of learning and there was no point sitting in class trying to record myself signing a sentence over 10 times.

 

Now I don’t mind if I make mistakes and I embrace them and learn from them. It’s nice to be able to open up videos that I post on the different subjects I’ve learned to have something to practice with for my Final test. It allows me to work on words I don’t remember and see what I did well. It’s also nice to be able to see the progress of my NZSL through the videos I’ve posted on my blog because I can see whether I actually improved or not.

 

The first test I had mid semester was pretty frustrating and I remember stressing out before the test because I had no idea what a sign language test was like. I’m glad I did my best though and achieved a grade that I can be proud of. I don’t feel as stressed going in to my Final because now I know what I can expect. I can also practice on the sections I didn’t do so well on to make sure I can improve from what I got in my mid semester test. Although there isn’t much room for improvement because I did really well, but you can always improve no matter what score you get.

 

I feel the tips and tricks I posted in my first week of these posts were helpful for me. I’m hopeful that it may also be helpful to anyone else who is studying NZSL. Expression is very important when signing and I think many people struggle to express themselves when they sign because they tend to overthink. It’s good to be able to think about what sentence you’re going to sign first then sign it rather than thinking of each word as you go. It also helps when you rearrange the sentence in your head. For example, ‘I live in an apartment in Central Auckland’ would be ‘Me live apartment there Central Auckland’ or ‘I don’t work’ would be ‘work me not yet me’. Thinking about it before you go in to sign makes it easier (at least it does for me) to remember how to sign the words.

 

Although I didn't interview a person who uses NZSL, I think being at that class where my teacher was explaining the deaf community and culture was the next best thing for someone who wasn't quite ready to communicate in sign outside of class. It was a nice experience being able to have insight to what a deaf person’s life might be like. The deaf culture is very interesting and it opens your eyes to some of the struggles people face in society, struggles you could never understand yourself. It taught me to appreciate the deaf culture and community that much more. Even more so when I attempted my personal experiment, it really opened up my eyes to what those struggles might be like. I remember talking about deaf club and my teacher explaining that it was a place where deaf people could relax and be happy and communicate with other people who knew NZSL. It was nice to see that the deaf community is so welcoming and they are able to fit in society where mostly everyone is hearing. 

 

My attempt at interpreting a scene was quite fun. I got to see how good my skills were when it came to my knowledge of New Zealand Sign language. Even though it might not be very accurate, it was still great to try. As I said before, I wouldn’t ever even attempt to interpret a song mainly because of a video I had watched about song interpretation into American Sign Language. The person who was being interviewed for the video had explained that music interpretation was more than just translating words but also translating the ideas and the feeling of the music as well. It is important to convey the music through your expressions and the way you sign each line of the song. This takes a lot of skill and someone with lots of experience because if a deaf wanted to know the lyrics of a song just by words they could just look it up online. However, it takes a step further to convey the true feeling of a song so that the deaf person can experience more than just the words.

 

Creating this blog has been quite difficult for me as I have never had to post anything online that was more than 1000 words. Trying to figure out how I was going to execute this blog took quite a while for me to sort out and being able to post on time was my biggest challenge, especially using a platform I had never used before. However, I don’t regret this experience and I’m glad that I have something to show for it. I am extremely proud of what I have achieved and I hope that anyone who comes across this blog can appreciate what I’ve come up with.