My second love

In my previous posts you heard a lot about English and contents of my English course and I guess now it’s time to talk about my second language, the Austrian sign language. You probably wonder why I choose to study this demanding, amazing and active language. The answer to that question is that my mum did a beginners course some years ago and I was fascinated whenever I saw her practicing the vocabulary in front of the mirror. In the following text I want to introduce you to some special features and singularities of the Austrian sign language.

Facial expression

The most essential part of the sign language is the facial expression. For this reason, the first thing we learned was how to make the craziest and weirdest mops and mows. In the oral language we do not really consider the facial expressions, so our faces felt rusted in and inelastic. Most of the signs have their own facial expression to differ them because the tricky part about sign language is that some words have the same sign and you can only distinguish them by their  facial expression.  Fun fact, my family noticed that I used facial expression more often after my first lecture, the same goes with the gesture. My sister actually told me once to get my hands out of her face but I couldn’t let them hanging while I was talking. 

Gesture

As you may probably know you don’t really use your voice while you are signing. Be careful because that doesn’t mean that you don’t talk, you mouth the words without a sound. At the beginning it was tough not to utter something but after some time I got used to it. The mouthing is one of my favourite features of the sign language course because as a consequence it’s always quit during the lectures. Sometimes it’s too quit so that you can hear all the phones vibrating and ringing but most of the time I really enjoy this one hour of total silence. 

Grammar

Another great feature of the sign language is that you don’t really have to sit down and learn the grammar for hours and hours, broadly speaking you just put the verb at the end of the sentence. This little grammatical difference makes it really hard to translate sign language to German because you have to wait for the verb to come. Nevertheless, in most cases you can suspect where the person, speaking sign language, wants to get at. 

Finger alphabet

Lastly I want to show you the Austrian finger alphabet and its advantages. At the picture on the right site you can see all the different letters with their signs. You can use it whenever your collocutor doesn’t get what you are signing. Additionally it’s great when you want to tell your friend something that not everybody in the room should hear or when your collocutor is too far away to understand what you are trying to tell him. If you are interested and have a little bit of time have a look at the alphabet and try to learn some letters. Give it a go, it’s really convenient!