Slow Is Faster
sooo. no new sign today either. two lessons in a row without a new sign, i know, but stay with me because this one might matter more than half the signs we've done so far.
here's the thing i see every single time i teach a beginner class. somebody learns three or four signs, gets a little confidence, and then speeds up. hands start moving fast, sloppy, kind of mushed together, like they're trying to prove they've got it down. and it does the opposite of what they want. fast and mushy reads as lost. clear and slow reads as fluent.
that's not a nice-sounding thing i made up for the handout. i actually believe it. slow is faster. i'll explain what i mean.
what "fast" actually costs you
when you rush a sign, a few things happen and none of them are good.
your handshape gets lazy. remember a few lessons back, "fine" going sideways because the handshape was off? that gets worse under speed, not better. you round off the corners of the sign because your hands are trying to keep up with how fast you think you should be talking.
your location drifts. signs that live near your chin end up somewhere near your collarbone. small thing, but to somebody actually fluent, that's the difference between a clear sign and a guess.
and your face — which we just spent a whole lesson on — goes flat, because all your attention went to your hands. you can't fake urgency with speed if your face isn't doing anything.
so what you end up with is a fast blur that a fluent signer has to stop and decode. which is the opposite of communicating.
the porch lesson
i think about this every time because of the very first "class" i ever ran, before this was a class, before it had a room or a sign-up sheet or anything.
it was just me on my porch with three neighbors. no plan. i didn't even prep anything, i just said "come over, i'll show you what i know" and figured we'd do twenty minutes. it went ninety. nobody left.
and the reason it worked, looking back, is that i wasn't rushing anybody. i'd show a sign, we'd all do it wrong on purpose once just to laugh about it, then do it slow and right, then somebody would ask a question and we'd just sit in it a minute. nobody was racing to the next thing. by the end all three of them could do six or seven signs clean, slow, no hesitation. not fast. clean.
that's the whole model for this class, honestly. that porch. slow, a little goofy, nobody in a hurry.
how to actually practice this at home
this is the practical part, so here's what i want you doing this week, not as a drill but as an actual habit.
cut your speed in half, on purpose. whatever sign you're doing, do it slower than feels natural. it'll feel weirdly formal, almost like you're performing it. that's fine. that slow version is closer to correct than your normal speed.
hold the end of the sign for one full second. most beginners clip the ending, they're already halfway into the next sign before the first one's finished. force yourself to hold it. one-mississippi, then move on.
say the sentence out loud in your head, slow, while you sign it. this sounds silly but it keeps your pacing honest. if you can't say the words that slow in your head, you're going too fast with your hands.
practice in front of a mirror or your phone camera. not to be vain about it, just so you can actually see what "slow" looks like on you versus what it feels like. those are two different things and beginners are always surprised by the gap.
one caution here, not a safety thing exactly but close to it: don't practice fingerspelling fast to show off. i did this with my own last name in front of my kids, tried to fly through the double-t in "peterson" to look impressive, and completely fumbled it. kade still brings it up. fingerspelling especially needs to be slow, because if you get sloppy nobody can read it back, including you.
the opinion part, plainly
i'll say the thing i believe outright: useful and slow beats impressive and fast, every time, at this stage. you are not being graded on speed. nobody fluent is sitting there thinking "wow, look how fast." they're thinking "can I actually understand what this person is saying." slow gets you understood. fast gets you a blur and a confused look back.
give yourself permission to be slow this week. it's not the beginner version of the skill. for a while, it just is the skill.
Before next time
pick two signs you already know cold and practice them at half speed, with the one-second hold at the end, a few times a day. that's it. see if slow feels different in your hands by the time we meet again.
~terry