Studying Sign Languages at the University

Hey Wonderland people, I am in my semester holidays FINALLY! In Germany, a semester is about 6 months, but only 3-4 of them are filled with classes the other months are left free for writing exams or working. I work regularly so I will use it mostly for writing but also for relaxing 😉 And I thought about what I could write about here on my blog. Because I get asked in my letters often what exactly studying sign languages is like, I decided to write a post!

I started studying sign languages in Winter 2018, it was one of two possible Bachelor courses. The second one would have been sign language interpreting, which is basically not only theoretical knowledge about the community and stuff but also training to become an interpreter after graduating. That’s the biggest difference between the two courses. Studying sign languages, in general, is more about linguistics and how a language is processed in the brain.

It is a very new and rare course, that’s why you can’t study it at every university in Germany. The biggest three being Berlin, Colone, and Hamburg. I decided to study in Hamburg, so I can only say what’s like over there, maybe it’s different at the other universities. In Hamburg, you get thrown into cold water basically xD Meaning that the first classes you will have are language learning classes held by a deaf professor. The first few times two interpreters sat with us in the room, helping us asking important questions, technically stuff und information about which books to buy, things like that. But after that, they are gone and we literally have to communicate using everything we got xD

So what does a sign language learning class look like? There are not many books to go off and only a very old software with videos to use. So most of the time the professor will have a certain topic, a set of words like food for example, or a certain sign language technique he wants to teach us and then he makes a presentation about it. He signs every word, we try to imitate it and if we can, we use the sign in a sentence. Over and over again until we have memorized it. The first few things we learned revolved all-around family, so I remember signing about my family members, their names, and their jobs to my fellow students. This is a great way to get to know people who were total strangers to me back then xD

Other than the language learning classes we had lectures about deaf culture and what being deaf entails aside from the loss of hearing. Those lectures were held by a deaf professor too, but they were interpreted fully, not only the first few sessions xD That’s for mostly two reasons, one being that the lecture halls are very big and when you sit in the last row, you can’t really see the professor signing. Reason two is that lectures, in general, are open for every student of the university, and students from other faculties should have the option to listen to them too. So the interpreters had microphones, voicing the whole 90 minutes.

In later semesters I began having more linguistic-style classes, readings studies about the processing of sign language in the brain, comparing it to spoken languages but also comparing different sign languages with another. Learning what scientific research methods there are, what an EGG is for example 😛 Those classes were mostly held by hearing researchers in spoken language, I guess having them in sign language would have made it even harder to follow xD

Now that I am more or less in the middle of my bachelor studies, I mostly have specific classes for learning specific things. This semester I had a psychology class in sign language and even held my first presentation about fear in the german sign language DGS(deutsche Gebärdensprache). I also had a class about cinematography, which was basically about how to describe film scenes in sign language. Super interesting I highly recommend watching videos about that on YouTube if you are interested!

So you now got a small glimpse of what studying sing language in Germany looks like. It’s a bit hard because there are so few materials to learn from. Learning is very intuitive, basically, when you can remember things quickly, you have an advantage. But I would not say it’s not worth trying 😉 I have learned so much about the deaf community, things that should actually be reached school. And even though learning sign language was hard and I still have to practice a lot, it was fun too.

If you have any questions about sign languages, please ask them in the comments and I will try to answer them as good as I can^^
Greetings and good wishes
The Mad Hattress
PS. I’ll give you a full table of the german sign language alphabet, so if you want to, you can try signing your name 😉