My Pleasure In Sign Language

Getting Started With My Pleasure In Sign Language

I picked up My Pleasure In Sign Language about two years ago after going through three other sign language apps that were either too childish or just wrong about hand positioning. This one filled a gap. It's focused on American Sign Language with video demos from actual fluent signers, and it has a structured path that doesn't make you guess what to practice next. The app downloads free from both the App Store and Google Play. The core library is free too, but the advanced modules — fingerspelling patterns, conversational roleplay, and regional dialect notes — sit behind a subscription. At the time of writing that's around ten dollars a month or eighty a year. I pay yearly. Cheaper that way and you don't have to remember to cancel. Here's how I actually use it day to day instead of just opening it and scrolling endlessly.

My Pleasure In Sign Language

First, set your goal level honestly. The app asks this on signup — beginner, intermediate, or conversational. Pick the real one, not the aspirational one. I picked beginner last time because my fingerspelling speed was trash, and the app adjusted everything below that level accordingly. If you skip this or pick advanced by accident, the early lessons feel pointless and you'll drop it within a week. The core learning loop is repetition with feedback. You watch a short video of a signer demonstrating a sign, then you record yourself doing it. The app's computer vision checks your hand shape, palm orientation, and movement path against a reference. It's not perfect but it catches most beginner mistakes. I'd say it's roughly seventy percent accurate on hand shape recognition and worse on movement-based signs where your arm drifts outside the frame. That accuracy gap matters more than the marketing copy admits. Here's a specific problem I ran into. I was practicing the sign for "help" — flat hand palm up moving upward from the wrist area. The app kept marking me wrong even though I was doing it correctly according to every ASL textbook I own. Turns out the training data for that particular sign had a biased reference frame. The camera angle in the reference video made the hand appear closer to the body than it actually should be, and the computer vision model was penalizing normal signing distance. I worked around it by switching to a different lesson set within the app — they have alternate trainers for some signs — and also practiced using a mirror instead of the camera for that specific set. Same result, less frustration.

After each lesson the app gives you a difficulty rating and schedules review. The spaced repetition engine is decent. It pushes signs you got wrong harder and lets signs you nailed go further between repetitions. The algorithm adjusts based on your accuracy score, reaction time, and consistency across attempts. It took me about ten lessons to trust the schedule enough to stop second-guessing when a sign disappeared for three days and came back feeling fresh. One thing beginners consistently miss: the fingerspelling section. Most people skip it because it's tedious and the visual feedback is slower to respond. But fingerspelling is where you actually learn handshapes. If you can spell your name fluently without looking at your own hands, everything else becomes easier. I spent three weeks just on fingerspelling before touching full signs. My total signing speed doubled after that because I stopped fighting my hands to form individual letters. The conversational module is the app's most advanced feature and also its weakest. It pairs you with an AI signer for scripted dialogues. The AI recognizes basic signs and responds in text or simple signed video. It works fine for A1 to A2 level practice. At B1 and above you'll notice it stalls on anything involving abstract concepts or non-manual markers — those facial expressions and head tilts that carry grammatical weight in ASL. The AI doesn't track those properly. I learned this the hard way during a practice conversation about my weekend plans where I signed casually and the AI asked me to repeat myself four times. I switched to practicing with the grammar breakdown videos instead, which explain non-manual markers properly, and came back to the conversational module later. It improved slightly but hasn't caught up yet.

For the grammar section, pay attention to the classifier descriptions. These are signs that represent objects or their movement through space. They're how you describe scenes rather than just single words. Most beginner courses barely touch them. My Pleasure In Sign Language has a dedicated unit on basic Class 1 and Class 2 classifiers with video examples. This took me from signing individual words to actually constructing coherent little stories, which is the whole point of learning the language instead of just a vocabulary list. Download and install first, then spend twenty minutes on the placement test before committing. Don't ignore the placement test. I've seen people breeze past it and start at a level that's already too easy, which bogs down motivation. The test is about fifteen minutes and covers handshapes, facial expressions, and basic word order. Your results determine where the curriculum branches. Practice in short sessions. Fifteen to twenty minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday. Motor memory for sign language works the same way it does for any physical skill — consistent low-volume repetition builds neural pathways faster than marathon sessions that leave your hands sore and your attention shot.

If you want something that supplements this well, pair it with ASL Nads or The Deaf Kid on YouTube for native signer content. The app teaches you the mechanics. YouTube shows you how real people actually sign in real time, which includes all the shortcuts and regional variations the app smooths over for clarity. Between the two you get accuracy from the app and authenticity from native content.