I wasn’t sure how October’s 30 day challenge was going to go - learning sign language with this online course. The guidance suggests really taking your time so I didn’t want to rush through and set artificial deadlines when all I really wanted to do was explore the language. However, I was at a massive advantage being able to fingerspell already, so it became an achievable goal to get through the whole course in the month.

And I did! I got the lovely certificate at the end and everything. The course is really well done. At first, it felt like we were just learning random words and I couldn’t see how they were going to be useful, but then you start being able to put them together and make fully formed sentences and it’s very exciting. The final assessments at the end of the course features five videos of someone talking about themselves, their life, their recent holidays, and I really didn’t think I’d learnt enough to answer the questions afterwards… but I did! I got 95%, only one question wrong. Hooray!

This was a really rewarding month, and made me feel like I have a good grounding in the language, so that if needed, I could communicate with someone, however slowly! Now I’m curious to see what’s next. There are some apps out there with more learning available, there are actual qualifications, or maybe I’ll just keep practicing the words I know already. Such fun!