As some of you may recall, this past August I wrote about why I think American Sign Language (ASL) should be taught everywhere. When I wrote the piece, it had been right after one of my mother’s former students -- from her time as a teacher of the deaf -- visited with his three children, all of whom are also deaf. Although the visit made me realize how beneficial knowing ASL is for communication, it was only recently that I took it upon myself to get a better grasp on the language.

I recently started watching the television show “Switched at Birth,” and that is admittedly where my rekindled desire to learn ASL came from. The show features several characters who are deaf, two of which are main characters, and watching both the deaf and hearing characters learn to communicate with each other through signing reaffirmed my belief that we should all learn ASL. However, I also realized that the only way I could expect that of others is if I began learning it myself.

I already knew the alphabet from when I was younger, so finger-spelling was not an issue. Instead, I went online and started learning and memorizing vocabulary words, as well as basic sentence structures and how to order the subjects, direct objects and indirect objects in a sentence. In all honesty, I underestimated how confusing learning sentence structures in ASL would be, especially to someone who did not learn at a young age and cannot necessarily pick up the subtle nuances, such as the facial and body language required to convey meaning. However, despite having only learned basic words so far, the experience is one that has been exciting and is also one that I am glad I finally took upon myself to begin.

Learning ASL through the help of online guides and physical books is not something that I chose to do because I consider it “trendy” or “cool for now.” Although it is exciting to learn a different language that I otherwise would not be greatly exposed to, it is also beneficial in a way that many people do not give it credit for being. ASL -- despite being specific to our country -- is widespread in its various dialects and could be used for greater communication if more people took the initiative to learn the language, as well as the rich culture of the deaf community, of which it originated.

If you want to get a head start and impress your friends and family, here is a chart of the alphabet and numbers one through nine.