Learning Sign Language For Free

In case you have children who are deaf(either born deaf or lose their hearing before they learn a spoken language), you can send them to the Central Institution for the Deaf(CID) to get good education.

CID serves children with hearing loss birth through age 12 who typically live in or move to St. Louis, Missouri, southern Illinois and surrounding areas.

CID has been successful in teaching children who are deaf and hard of hearing to listen, talk, read and succeed. They partner with families and collaborate with universities, educators and other professionals worldwide to help children communicate to achieve their fullest potential.

This is the url:
http://www.cid.edu/

Deaf people appreciate the efforts of hearing people to learn and use sign. The slow communication speed is a common experience of anyone learning a new language. A deaf person will understand a hearing person's message even with mistakes, just as a hearing person will usually understand the spoken message of a person just learning English who makes some mispronunciations and grammatical errors.

Good lighting, unobstructed vision and a non-distracting, non-glare background are essential environmental conditions for successful and comfortable visual-based communication. A table in the middle of the room forces people to stand in a circle and provides them with a full view of each other. Loud noise interferes with successful and comfortable auditory-based interaction.

Facial expressions are a critical part of communication because they convey the emotions and tone of the conversation. Signing without facial expression is similar to monotone speech. Also, using voice and mouth movement helps a deaf person who has some lipreading skills and/or residual hearing. However, a loud voice and exaggerated mouth movement interferes with understanding the voiced message.

Like many of you, I have a girlfriend who is born muted. Communication has always been a minor problem for us since we have been quite long together and I can understand for most of the time but there were times which lead to some misunderstandings and frustrations due to miscommunication.

The biggest problem for me to learn sign language is that I don't have time to get a sign language tuition because I have to work late at night. Plus, I don't think there are any sign language tuition centers near my place either.

I have been looking around online and there are sites that provide good sign language learning.

Don't worry, you don't need to enter a University to learn sign language. ASL University is a free site that provides fast and easy sign language learning. I've started my sign language learning here and if there are any better sites to start with, this is the best I would recommend.

Pros:
The good thing is, the sign language that are taught here are basic level. You are able to learn the alphabets sign language from A-Z and some very common daily use words. For your ease of use, they even provide pictures and video learning which, you can undoubtedly master the fundamentals of sign language within no time.

Cons:
Since it is a free site, you can only learn part and parcel of the sign language. I have practised once in front of my muted girlfriend and to what I have expected, she got what I mean but she feedbacked that my sign language was terrible and broken.

Well, I definitely know that ASL University is not providing grammatical sign language enough, hence I tried to find other sources online to make myself much complete in sign language communication.

By the way, this is the official site of ASL University:
http://www.lifeprint.com/