How to Sign Common Objects in Sign Language

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Part of the video series: Sign Language Lessons: Common Phrases

Summary: Learn how to sign dance, flower, chair, table, and pretty with American Sign Language (ASL) tips in this free online sign language video tutorial clip.

Views: 3,671 | Tags: language, basic, american, signlanguagephrases, sign, sign language


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by KatD234

Oh my GOD, stop! Signs in ASL are not derived from the alphabet. Who let you on this site??

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Video Transcript

How to Sign Common Objects in Sign Language

Hello! My name is Melissa and on behalf of Expert Village, today we're going to be learning some basic signs, words, phrases in sign language. In this clip, we're going to learn the words dance, flower, pretty, chair, a and table. Perhaps you can imagine you're maybe somebody taking someone to a dance and you brought them flowers and you'd like to maybe tell them they look very pretty. Let's start off with the word pretty. What you need to do if you need know your ABCs is to form the letter P with your hand. P, if you don't know your ABCs, looks something like this. It tilts down. If I was to do it toward you it would look like this, but for now I'm just going to show you. Your index finger points straight out, your middle finger points down, and your thumb touches that finger. That is the letter P. What you then want to do is to take the middle finger and circle the face. Pretty. Pretty. You can say to someone, ‘you look very pretty.’ Now, let's talk about dance. Take your hand flat, form the letter V. This is again, where it's very important to know your alphabet. You'll see a lot of signals, hand signs, in sign language come from or are derived from the alphabet. Take the V, turn it upside down, and you move it back and forth across your hand like you're dancing. Dance. Flower. Again, much like animals let's pretend for a moment that you've received flowers. What do you do with flowers? You smell flowers because they smell beautiful. Take your hands and pretend that you're smelling flowers. This is again, where facial expression is very important. You can raise your eyebrows. Flower. Flower. Chair and table, because maybe you would like to offer someone a chair or a table. Again, the alphabet is very important. We take the letter C, standing for chair, and we take our 2 other fingers here and we hook them onto the bottom of the C. That signifies sitting in the chair. Chair. Table. Take your 2 hands like this and you want them to touch. Table. Table and chair. Do you remember pretty? Pretty. Pretty. Flower and dance.

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