ASL Bloom - Sign Language

I love this app, and have a couple pieces of advice for how to get more use out of it! I definitely recommend pairing learning through an app with learning from other teachers. Bill Vicars is an excellent instructor with his course load also posted online for free. The reason I don’t recommend using just an app is because you might miss out on cultural differences by location. For example, you don’t always have to sign “what” at the end of a “what” question since furrowing your brows and tilting your head indicates the wh- part of the question in the first place to many people. Also since there are sometimes multiple ways to sign the same thing, and certain versions may be used more in certain areas. Secondly practicing in public like at a bookstore, library, etc is a great way to learn. Especially since people who know ASL might come up to you to initiate a conversation in sign. You could know every sign someone is using and still not process what it means without experience.

I liked it a lot for the first handful of lessons, but then it got so random. After a few weeks of doing it every day, I’ve had to mostly learn from other sources and only really use ASL Bloom as a dictionary to store my signs learned from other places. Like why do you I need to know the signs for “plaid” and “polka dots” before I learn the signs for “a lot”, “a little”, “because”, “only”, “practice”, “see”, “hear”, “give”, “will”, “past”, “later” etc? I also don’t like how the dictionary doesn’t show different variations of the signs (like “change” can be done with S hands or with X hands, or there are 2 signs for divorce). From watching deaf content creators, I see different versions of many signs, but those aren’t included in the dictionary so I can’t save them. I also wish there was more conversation and more opportunities to sign and watch full sentences. There’s almost nothing about the word order, so it feels like random vocab memorization vs learning how to actually communicate in a new language. I also wish there was more spaced repetition of previous words so they could be reviewed over time (I do use the flash card feature to get a random mix of previous words though). Overall I think it has a lot of potential, but isn’t actually designed to teach you the parts of the language that matter (helpful vocab in real conversations). Please move the most frequently used words near the beginning of the course, and save the fluff like “plaid” and “polka dots” until the very end (or even available for lookup only). That would go a long way.

I’ve been using this app for a little over a week now and have progressed to the subscription chapters. I’m impressed!! It teaches in simple yet effective videos, quizzes, and matching. I especially like the flashcard section to practice signs already covered without redoing the teachings!! Too bad this is only a premium option. This means that once you’ve gone through all the lessons and don’t need to continue to subscribe you’ll lose access to all the flash cards you paid for previously. It’s not a cheap app, unfortunately, which will limit some on purchasing the subscription. Also, it’s a bummer that it doesn’t support family sharing so the kids can learn under their own account without having to purchase multiple subscriptions. I just can’t afford that. They’ll have to use my account even tho it will be inconvenient to keep up with who is at what lesson. But for the price, no way will I pay for multiple subscriptions just over a convenience. Overall its a good app, subscription service could be tweaked so that certain things, like the flashcards, could be lifetime access. That tweak might make it a great app. So I’ll use it and subscribe for a bit but it won’t be a long term app I’ll stick with.