Pros & Cons
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- Excellent content and compelling format
- Wonderful cast of instructors and actors
- Buy once, access forever
- Appropriate for deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing people
- Free for parents of deaf children younger than 36 months
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- No mobile apps
- Small improvements to interactive quiz design would help
Sign It ASL Specs
| Average Duration of Lesson (Mins) | 45-60 |
| No. of Languages Offered (Not Incl. English) | 1 |
| Price Includes | Video Lessons |
| Style of Program | Quizzes |
When you read a great novel or watch a show that hooks you, the characters start to feel like people you know. Sign It ASL, an online language learning program for American Sign Language, has the same effect. The material is fantastic, the structure is solid, and the people teaching you simply shine. As a result, you'll want to return to this sign language learning app day after day and keep up your progress. I love that you pay for it once and get access forever, too. For all these reasons, Sign It ASL is an Editors' Choice winner among language learning apps.
Pricing: Pay Once, Own It for Life
Sign It ASL is free to families that qualify. If you have a deaf or hard-of-hearing (HoH) child under 36 months, you can apply for the program at no cost. The idea is to make sure all deaf and HoH children have the opportunity to acquire a first language through their immediate family members.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)If you're learning for other reasons, you have to buy a membership. It's $349.99 for everything, or you can get a set of five sequential lessons (for example, 1–5, 6–10, etc.) for $109.99. Lessons 16–20 cost $199.99, however, perhaps because the advanced lessons have more content and take longer to work through. No matter which membership you buy, you pay once and get access for life.
Groups can buy packages at a good rate, though only for a year of access at a time. The Family/Small Group Account is good for up to 10 people and costs $349.99 per year. It's a great value if you have even three committed learners. Sign It also has a Class Account for up to 50 students ($1,249.99 per year) and a School Account for 100 students ($2,249.99 per year).
I haven't found another online ASL course that is anywhere close to as good as Sign It. Lingvano isn't nearly as engaging or rigorous, for example. Its developer doesn't list the prices publicly, saying they are based on a few factors (never a good sign). Last time we saw, the price was $17.99 per month, $47.97 for three months, or $119.88 per year.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)Another great online resource is Lifeprint.com, also known as ASL University (ASLU), taught by Dr. William G. Vicars, Ed.D.—he goes by Dr. Bill—Associate Professor of American Sign Language and Deaf Studies at California State University, Sacramento. Dr. Bill's site is free, though you can drop him a few bucks via Patreon or other apps if you want to make a donation. The site looks very old school. It doesn't have interactive quizzes or a dashboard to track your progress. Once you figure out where the video lessons are, you can easily get hooked on them because the content is great, but they aren't as well-ordered and structured as Sign It's lessons.
Getting Started: It Works Well for All Kinds of Learners
Sign It ASL is appropriate for deaf, HoH, and hearing people alike. The lessons are all videos, and each lesson has more than one quiz. Sign It ASL is available only as a web app, but it still works pretty well in a mobile web browser. I have one quibble with the mobile site, which I explain later.
Sign It combines sign language instruction with audio voice-overs and optional closed captioning. It's suitable for adults, young adults, and some older children (about age 10 and up). Younger children are better off with the specifically tailored lessons in My Signing Time or Baby Signing Time, which come from the same creators as Sign It ASL.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)Each lesson takes anywhere between about 50 and 90 minutes to complete. You can do lessons out of order, skip ahead, repeat lessons, and so forth. Everything is at your demand. Every lesson also has a theme and a story as its backbone. The story plays out in scenes, almost like a short television show or skit, and between scenes, you get instructions and quizzes.
At the end of the lessons are bonus scenes, including interviews with the cast, creators, special guests, and even one of the consultants who advises the show. The interviews are worth watching. You might end up going down a few rabbit holes looking up more information about CODAs (children of deaf adults) or the community in Martha's Vineyard, where everyone signed, deaf and hearing alike.
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(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)The language in the stories, instructions, and quizzes is all related. For example, in a lesson about the language of neighbors and housing, the storyline centers on a man who moves into a new house and has an annoying neighbor. You learn words for apartment, backyard, block party, condo, fence, house, neighbor, and so on. In the story, you watch the characters use these same word signs, along with others that you learned in earlier lessons, and some completely new ones.
You can speed up or slow down the playback. The site also has a dictionary for reference. If you forget how to sign a particular word, you can always look it up and watch a video of it.
The Learning Experience: Simply Fantastic
Compared with other ASL learning sites, Sign It ASL is fantastic. The site is modern, with a learning dashboard and other markers to help you track your progress. With very few exceptions, the videos load quickly and play clearly, which is important so that you can see the signs in all their detail, including finger positions, hand shapes, and facial expressions. When you take a quiz, the system keeps track of your right and wrong answers.
One of the most valuable aspects of Sign It ASL is its diverse cast. In the instruction sections, you see the main host, Rachel Coleman, teach you a new sign. Then you watch other people sign it, too. They are old and young, with different skin shades. Some have agile fingers, and some have stiff hands. At least one person is left-handed. You see that not everyone signs the same words in exactly the same way. That exposure is crucial to learning ASL well. It's like listening to people with different accents, voices, and pitches speak when learning a spoken language.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)The lessons also do a great job of mixing in other skills you need in ASL. For example, fingerspelling (using the ASL alphabet to spell out words) comes up regularly. It isn't merely relegated to the first few lessons. Sentence development starts early in the lessons, so you aren't merely signing individual words, and it builds as you progress. Grammar points are rolled into various lessons. You learn about ASL gloss, nonmanual markers, the word order of questions, and other important concepts.
The site doesn't explicitly teach a few concepts, but they are present enough for anyone to pick them up. For example, you don't learn formally about name signs, but you see people fingerspell their names and then give their name signs, which is enough to figure it out. In the bonus content interviews, the interviewees sometimes tell the story behind their name signs, which adds to your understanding.
When watching the scenes, you likely won't know every word being signed, which is fine. When learning any language, your course of study should push you beyond what you know, so you can see how much you can figure out from context. That's all part of the learning experience.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)The site could use a few small tweaks to improve it, especially in the quiz sections. Sometimes a quiz page loads slowly, and completing quizzes requires excessive clicking. You have to choose an answer, confirm it, and then click the Next button to move to the next question. All that could be streamlined.
On the mobile version of the site, if you replay a video because you didn't quite catch the sign the first time, you see an overlay of buttons to pause, go back, and go forward, which prevents you from actually watching the very short video a second time. It takes as long for the controls to disappear as it does for the video to play.
Those problems seem easily solvable. In any case, they're minor downsides that don't diminish the rest of the learning experience.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Sign It ASL)
Sign It ASL
Sign It ASL is the best online site for learning American Sign Language; it caters to a wide range of people and offers excellent instruction in a fun format.