I took a sign language course years ago, but it was not ASL. I have no idea what language I actually learned.

Question

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Answer 1

You're in trouble my friend. For all you know you may have learned Swahili sign language. It was prbaly American Standard though.

Answer 2

First let me clear up some misconceptions about ASL and English influenced signing or manually coded forms that are used to represent English on the hands.

American Sign Language has its own grammatical structures, etc. Having said that, ASL is only expressed through the hands, body and face. ASL is primarily used in the US and most of Canada. English is the language that most folks use here in the US (and other places!). English is written and spoken.

ASL is not spoken or written. English is not signed.

They are two separate languages that use different modes for expression.

Now there have been manually coded forms that were developed (SEE, SEE2, LOVE, etc.) to represent English on the hands. These coded forms were developed to assist persons who are D/deaf or hard of hearing to gain access to English grammatical structures, English phonemes, what have you... (The politics behind this is HUGE and the effects of these codes were not predicted.) As these were DEVELOPED by committee, they are not languages. Languages are naturally occurring, developed by a community of users over time to communicate with each other.

Sometimes you will hear the terms "Pidgin signed English", "Manually coded English", "Signed English", etc. These terms are outdated and have been found to be an incorrect description. This is a new development and may not be agreed upon by all scholars!

There are times when signers will use sign that has been initialized (due to the influence of the created code systems). There are also signers that will sign in a grammatical format that is closer to English. Some signers do that because they are trying to make it easier for those learning sign to learn ASL (but they really aren't helping!) Some will sign this way to protect "ASL" from outsiders. Some are signing this way because they were brought up in an environment where they were exposed to the coded forms of signing instead of ASL.

So what language did you learn in school? I would dare say that you didn't learn a LANGUAGE, that you were probably exposed to various signs, some may have been ASL and some coded forms that are meant to represent English on the hands. Unfortunately, many people have taken "ASL" courses that really weren't ASL courses. I was one of those folks! I had to start over from the beginning to learn real ASL.

Answer 3

If you took the class in America, it was either ASL or ESL. ASL is an actual foreign language to native English speakers. ESL is signing every spoken English word.

Answer 4

ASL is used worldwide and is considered universal, chances are if you took a course it was ASL.

Answer 5

They used to interpret word-for-word which was much harder. ASL is much faster.