Review: ‘101 Basic Signs’ CD-ROM

This CD ROM was designed for use by beginning signers who might not have access to a sign language class but who want to learn some signs in the privacy of their own home. The program offers various ways to learn signs, including both receptive and expressive skills. The English words are easy to read, and the overall screen is cleanly designed and attractive. It tracks your responses, marking words that you indicate you know, but presenting them again later for review. Videos are clear, and can be paused.

You can choose whether to practice receptive or expressive skills. For receptive skills, you see a sign first, and then the English word. For expressive skills, you see the English word first, for an amount of time that you can set. Then the sign video appears. You can also look up a sign from an alphabetical list of English words. There are both “training” and “review” activities.

The strengths of the program lie in its clear and simple screen and presentation of both expressive and receptive skills. Also, it presents a good selection of useful signs for a beginner. The signs were selected with businesses in mind, including signs for “early”, “late”, “money”, “coffee” and “boss”, for example.

There are some weaknesses, however. The speed of the video signs is very slow even with a pentium processor and there’s no way to change it to normal signing speed. And, while the manual indicates that signs you have said you “know” will only be repeated twice for review, they come up more often than that. The program doesn’t remember signs that you’ve learned from one session to the next, and doesn’t have any means to select particular signs for a practice session.

The program also lacks some of the learning aids found in complete CD Rom dictionaries. There are no mnemonic hints about the origin of the sign, and no indication of whether you are looking at the noun or verb form of a sign, which are often different. Other ways of signing the same concept aren’t shown, nor are other possible English words for a particular sign.

In summary, while the program is visually clear and attractive and offers expressive as well as receptive skills practice, it’s usefulness is mainly limited to the most beginning students who prefer to see very slow videos of just a limited number of signs.

Currently the program is only available on Windows, but a Macintosh version is planned for late 1999. Also, there will be a second CD produced soon with signs selected by teachers.

101 Basic Signs — Publisher: Palatine Inc. (www.palatineInc.com). Windows 3.x or higher. Cost: $69.95. Requires: 486/33MHz or higher, 8 MB RAM, 2x CD-ROM drive, mouse, VGA monitor.