Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Sign Language

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One of my favorite languages is American Sign Language. It is indeed
different in each country; British Sign Language (BSL) is vastly different,
although ASL took a lot of inspiration from French Sign Language (LSF,
Langue des Signes Française).
This feels like the most natural language to use, as you express yourself
fully with your body—so much so that I find it more efficient to use to express
many concepts than spoken or written languages.
One of the best things by far, though, is that after learning the alphabet
very well (both recognizing it and practicing doing it yourself), a beginner
never needs a dictionary or to refer back to a spoken language. Once you have
done this, whenever you come across a sign you don’t understand, you simply
ask the person you are signing with to finger-spell it for you, and you can do
the same, finger-spell a word when you don’t know its sign. You will have to
do this a lot, at the start, and get used to people finger spelling quickly, but the
great thing is that you can stay within sign language as a learner.
When you do learn a new sign, it is almost always intuitively logical. The
sign incorporates a position relative to the body or a shape or an action, or it
adapts the sign of a letter, which makes its meaning apparent. As such,
sometimes you can even guess when you aren’t confident, to fill in the gaps.
With some wording changes (you don’t speak from day one, but sign from
day one), a lot of what I wrote about already is applicable to learning sign
language. Try to spend time with signers, deaf or hard of hearing people, or
sign language teachers from the very beginning and get used to using the
language for real with them. You don’t even have to live near a deaf
community (such as Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, or the Texas
School for the Deaf in Austin, Texas) because you can learn it via Skype! If
anything, video calls over Skype, Google+, your smartphone, or other like
systems are ideally suited to ASL because of how visual the language is.
Finally, there are countless wonderful video blogs (vlogs) in ASL on YouTube.
For much more on ASL and other sign languages, see fi3m .com/sign.
Other Languages
I hope you are seeing in this book that it’s all about getting started with saying
something. The purpose of this chapter has been to give you some
encouragement in whatever language you may be learning and to show you
that you can look at its complex features in a different way, so that you can get
into using the language as soon as possible.

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There are so many languages, I couldn’t possibly cover them all in this
chapter, but I hope this sample helps most of you. If the language you are
learning is not listed here, don’t worry. I have written encouraging summaries,
or used guest posts from a speaker of that language to write a summary, and
you can find them on fi3m.com/langs, with new ones added regularly.
For more about concepts related to grammar in language learning,
grammatical features like cognates, modal verbs, conjugations, and much more
related to topics introduced in this chapter, check out fi3m.com/ch–6.

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CHAPTER 7

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