A Hard weekend of Auslan

I work with computers for a living (a systems administrator for those of you who know a little about the industry). This gives me an advantage with working with computers to make my life easier and the ability to give me information at my fingertips. However there is always a cost of having increased information, and that is increased time required to absorb that information and turn it into knowledge.

On Thursday night I spent three hours writing a script (programme) to download all of the video signs from http://www.auslan.org.au for my own personal use in educating myself more in Auslan. If this is in breach of the copyright of the site then I do apologise. I also downloaded the synonyms and meanings of the words and grouped them all appropriately together so that I can easily look them up. I then loaded them onto my phone with appropriate free software to be able to display them. Now I can lookup the signs for over 7000 words quickly wherever I am. For instance I just timed myself and from a cold start it took me 20 seconds to look up the word "Whatever" and so now I know how to sign it.

The next part involved getting a set of pictures that Raphael can look at so I can then teach him the sign for the word. The reason that I was thinking of doing it this way is because of the outstanding success that I had previously with teaching Raphael signs from pictures. He loves looking at the pictures on my phone and then signing it.

So my wife and I started scanning/photographing the pictures from a childrens' picture dictionary of 1500 words. Then I spent another couple of hours writing another script to compare the list of video signs with the list of picture signs that I had and creating folder of all of the correlating pictures.

So now all I have to do is stay one letter ahead of Raphael to teach him a stack of signs. So far I have gone through about 60 signs and reviewed or learned all of them. This has brought me up to about half way through the letter b so there is plenty more to do. I have only scanned up to the letter D, so I will need to do more photographing of the dictionary aswell.

That is my plan but there is one serious flaw to the plan. Raphael learns faster than I do.

This is the sort of thing that I have access to now:


Click on image to replay the sign.

crash

smash

accident

As a Noun

1. An event in which a moving car or other vehicle hits something and is badly damaged or destroyed. English = crash, smash, accident.

As a Verb or Adjective

1. Of a car or other moving vehicle, to hit something and be badly damaged or destroyed. English = crash, smash, have an accident.