When you read a great novel or watch a TV 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 site itself has everything you’d expect for a great learning experience—but it’s the people teaching you who really shine. As a result, it’s easy to return to this sign language learning app day after day and keep up your progress. It’s an excellent value, with a fair one-time price for access, making Sign It ASL an Editors’ Choice winner among language-learning apps.Sign It ASL is appropriate for deaf, hard of hearing (HoH), and hearing people alike. Note that this review is written by a hearing person and is not intended to speak for the experiences of the deaf community.How Much Does Sign It ASL Cost?Sign It ASL is free to families that qualify. If you have a deaf or HoH child younger than 36 months, you can apply to get the program for free. The idea is to make sure all deaf and HoH children have the opportunity to acquire a first language through their immediate family members.
If you’re learning for other reasons, you buy access to online lessons, which are in the form of videos and quizzes. You pay once and get access for life. The full course has 20 lessons, with each lesson lasting about an hour. To get all the lessons costs $159.99. Alternatively, you can buy sets of five sequential lessons (for example, 1–5, 6–10, etc.) for $49.99 each. Bought separately, the whole course costs about $200. Considering what you get, the price for all 20 lessons is extremely reasonable and well worth it, and so in most cases, I recommend that plan.
Group access for 10 people costs $349.99 per year. Class accounts for 50 students and 1 account manager cost $1,249.99 per year. School accounts, which can also be used for businesses, allow for 100 learners and 1 account manager for $2,249.99 per year.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
Comparative PricingI haven’t found another online ASL course that is anywhere close to Sign It ASL. There’s Lingvano, which isn’t nearly as engaging or rigorous, and the developer doesn’t list the prices publicly, saying they vary by a few factors (never a good sign). On my last check, it was advertised $17.99 per month, $47.97 for three months, or $119.88 per year.Another great online resource is Lifeprint.com, also known ASL University or 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 where you can track your progress. Once you figure out where the video lessons are, however, 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.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
Getting Started With Sign It ASLAs Sign It ASL is suitable for deaf, HoH, and hearing people alike, it combines sign language instruction with audio voice-overs and optional closed captioning. It’s suitable for adults, young adults, and some older children (perhaps age 10 and up). Younger children are better served by lessons specifically tailored for them in My Signing Time or Baby Signing Time, which are made by the same creators as Sign It ASL.Sign It ASL is currently only available as a web app with no dedicated mobile apps, although it works pretty well in a mobile web browser. I have one quibble with the mobile site, which I address later in this review.The lessons use a unique structure, which makes them compelling. While testing the app, lessons took at least 45 minutes to complete, and sometimes more than an hour. Anyone new to signing will likely want to repeat some of the lessons, too.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
Every lesson has a theme and a story as its backbone. The story plays out in scenes, almost like a short television show, 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 for the show. These interviews are some of the best segments Sign It ASL has to offer. I went down a few internet rabbit holes looking up other performances by some of the cast members and learning much more about deaf and CODA (child of deaf adults) culture in the process. It was highly rewarding. (Look up Maleni Chaitoo’s web series Don’t Shoot the Messenger and standup by Keith Wann in particular.)The language in the story, instruction, and quizzes are all related. For example, in a lesson about the language of neighbors and housing, the storyline has to do with a man who moves into a new house and has an annoying neighbor. You learn words for neighbor, house, condo, apartment, fence, backyard, block party, and so on. In the story, you watch the characters use these same word signs, plus some others that you learned in earlier lessons and some that are new.You can speed up or slow down the playback. The site has a dictionary, too, for reference. If you forget how to sign a particular word, you can always look it up and watch a video of it.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
The ASL Learning ExperienceCompared 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 the diversity of the 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, young, and have 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 to different people signing in different ways is crucial to learning ASL well. It’s like hearing people with different accents and different voice pitches speak when learning a spoken language.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
The lessons also do a great job of mixing up other skills you need in ASL so that you are exposed to them throughout. 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. Points of grammar get mixed into various lessons. You learn about nonmanual markers, ASL gloss, the word order of questions, and other important concepts.A few concepts aren’t explicitly taught, but they are present enough for anyone to pick up on them. For example, you don’t learn explicitly 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. In learning any language, there are moments when you need to stretch yourself beyond what you know and see how much you can pick up from context. That’s all part of the learning experience.
(Credit: Sign It ASL/PCMag)
The site could use small tweaks to make it better, especially in the quiz sections. The only place where I noticed the site would sometimes load slowly was in the quizzes. Plus, there’s some excessive clicking required here. You have to choose an answer, confirm the answer, and then click the Next button to move to the next question. All that could be streamlined.Additionally, on the mobile version of the site, if you replay a video because you didn’t quite catch the sign the first time around, you see an overlay of buttons to pause, go back, and go forward, which inhibits you from actually seeing the very short video a second time. It takes as long for the controls to disappear as it does for the video to play. All those problems seem easily solvable. In any case, they’re minor points that don’t diminish the rest of the learning experience.Verdict: The Best Online ASL InstructionSign It ASL is by far the best online tool for learning American sign language. It gets a combination of things right, offering good instruction, a compelling storytelling format, a clear learning dashboard, interactive quizzes, and a diverse cast of people to watch sign. Plus, you only pay a one-time fee for access rather than a recurring subscription fee. It’s been our Editors’ Choice winner since we first reviewed it in 2020.If you’re looking to learn spoken languages, try Editors’ Choice winners Rosetta Stone ($399 for lifetime access to all languages) if you’re new to a language, Lingoda (about $9.50 per class with a subscription) for online classes when you need more interaction with real people, and Duolingo (free) for daily practice. That said, the right app for you depends on what language you want to learn, your current level in that language, and other factors.
Pros
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 under 36 months
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The Bottom Line
There’s no better online site for learning American Sign Language than Sign It ASL. The instruction is excellent, the format is fun, and it’s appropriate for a wide range of learners.
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About Jill Duffy
Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software
I’ve been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you’re going to have a panic attack.My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I’ve been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I’ve also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.Follow me on Mastodon.
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