Learning Danish Sign Language (DSL) with only English as my primary language?
April 3, 2011 4:05 PM   Subscribe

[sign language filter] How can an American learn Danish Sign Language? Preferably without a tutor.

I have family coming to visit form Denmark in a few weeks along with 2 cousins that are deaf. I usually never have in depth or solo conversations them as its usually mediated by their mom or their brother.

The biggest obstacle would be i know nothing of the written Danish language. Searching through Google i see no way that it is possible to learn DSL as an american easily, so I resort to see if MeFi has any take on my particular situation.
posted by BurN_ to Education (5 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Since you only have a few weeks, I'm assuming that you only want to learn some of the most basic phrases, right? If so, it's easy enough to do so using the Tegnsprog website. You can type in any word (and press the Søg button) and it will play a video of someone saying the word in DSL. On the right of the video are common phrases in which the word appears. You can combine this with Google Translate and/or lists of common danish phrases (like this one; search Google to find more) and you should be able to learn at least a few dozen phrases before they arrive.
posted by helios at 4:32 PM on April 3, 2011


I think you'd actually get a lot farther by focusing your efforts on learning about Deaf culture (the context) too, rather than putting all stock in the language (the code). Here's an excellent place to start: Reading between the signs, by Anna Mindess. She explains a lot of behavioral and social-pragmatic things that people who don't have experience with Deaf culture would be completely oblivious to. Showing awareness of some of these social conventions, as well as why they exist, will make your communications with them so much easier. There are a lot of sign language jokes that capitalise on these things too...and now you'll get them! Good luck and have fun!
posted by iamkimiam at 4:44 PM on April 3, 2011


Yeah, wouldn't underestimate the complexity of any sign languages. They follow grammatical rules just as elaborate as any spoken language. This would be similar to trying to learn spoken Danish in a few weeks.
posted by Patbon at 10:15 PM on April 3, 2011


I lived in Denmark for several years, and although I occasionally saw deaf people signing on the metro, I didn't have any deaf friends, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

My (incomplete, non-expert) understanding of sign languages in general is that they usually evolve independently from spoken language, and have completely independent grammar and vocabulary (I'm pretty confident that this is the case with ASL and English). I do remember more than one person telling me that Danish and Swedish sign language are completely different languages, and that deaf people from either side of the Ørsund bridge can't communicate with one another; spoken Danish and Swedish are quite close, and it's pretty common for Swedes and Danes to understand one-another's language without any formal training, although it helps to have grown up watching enough TV from the other country. To summarize: even if you knew Danish it probably wouldn't help.

For what it's worth, the grammar of spoken Danish is, for the most part, pretty straightforward coming from English; it's the pronunciation that's a killer. Try to get your non-deaf family to pronounce "rødgrød med fløde" (literally "red porridge with cream") for you, and see if you can differentiate between the words "hun" (meaning "she") and "hund" (meaning "dog").
posted by Dr. Eigenvariable at 5:31 AM on April 4, 2011


I don't know if I'm too late, but seeing as I'm deaf (from Germany, though), I hope I can contribute a bit:

Dr Eigenvariable is right; written languages don't have anything in common with their signed counterparts. So knowing Danish wouldn't be necessary to learn DSL.

But: deaf people often use fingerspelling when they have to spell things/names, so that would be a good place to start, along with helios' suggestion. Here is the Danish finger alphabet (which is the same as the German one, incidentally). If they know English, you can use it to spell words and then ask for the sign, so they can then teach you. Just my two cents - good luck! :-)

As an aside: when I visited a deaf friend in the USA and neither of us knew the other one's sign language but we were fluent in written English, having met over the internet, we just used the finger alphabet for communicating (ow, the cramps... *laughs*) at first, later we segued into a mix of finger spelling and ASL signs that she taught me for commonplace expressions.
posted by sparrowspike at 3:12 AM on April 19, 2011


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