One of the revelations in doing the BSL course has been the range of resources I have found on the web, not that it should be a surprise, just that I have never had cause to seek them out before.

I can highly recommend the Bristol Centre for Deaf Studies mobile app. When I was learning Spanish the house became bejewelled with post-its with the Spanish translation for the relevant object on them. This has been a little harder to do with sign language. With the mobile app I can look things up as they come to me and I can test myself to see what I have remembered.

This is sometimes a challenge when the various resources use a slightly different sign and they then vary again from what we are taught in class. Like regional variations and different accents you just have to be mindful of the alternative versions.

In some ways it is nice to be a naïve learner again, to come across surprises, to be taken aback by assumptions so clearly made out of awareness and to delight in the baby steps of progress. It takes a great deal of effort and attentiveness but it is very rewarding when single words become sentences and sentences become conversations