How To Learn Sign Language Fast: Tips From A Language Expert

A listener named Alex from Germany sent me a question that opened up a part of the language world I'd never really explored before.

While studying abroad in South Africa, he attended a sign language course out of curiosity — and got completely hooked.

Back home, he started learning German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache), but with lessons only once a week, he was keen to push forward faster.

He wanted to know: do I have any experience with sign languages, and are there strategies specific to learning them?

I've spent some time in this world, and what I discovered surprised me. If you're curious about how to learn sign language, here's what I think is worth knowing.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the YouTube version of this post at the top of the page. You can also listen to the podcast version below. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this post:

Sign Languages Are Not Universal

The first thing that struck me — and the mistake I'm slightly embarrassed to admit — is that I used to assume sign language was more or less the same everywhere.

I'd never really thought about it. It seemed logical, somehow, that a visual language would transcend national borders.

It doesn't. German Sign Language is different from French Sign Language, which is different from British Sign Language (BSL), which is different again from American Sign Language (ASL).

And it goes further than that: even within a single country, you'll find regional variation. The teacher I worked with on our Breakthrough BSL course was from Birmingham, and she explained that there are signs specific to that region — a kind of Brummy accent in sign language, if you will.

I made the mistake of assuming otherwise when I filmed a video with my friend Yuki, a remarkable young polyglot who knew Spanish Sign Language.

I captioned the video with the ASL logo. Viewers who knew ASL spotted the error immediately: the signs were clearly not ASL.

I corrected it in the video description, but the episode was a good reminder of just how rich and varied sign languages are around the world.

The Creativity Behind Every Sign

One of the things I found most fascinating when I spent time learning about BSL was the sheer creativity involved in how signs are constructed.

Some signs are pictographic — the movement or shape of the hand resembles the thing being described. Animals are a good example: you can often see what a sign represents just by looking at it.

But for abstract concepts — a word like “theory”, for instance — there's no easy visual shortcut. In those cases, signs are sometimes invented, or the word is simply spelled out using fingerspelling.

Watching a fluent signer fingerspell at speed is genuinely astonishing. What looks like a blur to the uninitiated is, for them, completely natural — the result of thousands of repetitions.

Is There A Deaf Community Politics I Should Know About?

Yes, and it's significant. Our BSL teacher felt strongly enough about this that she recorded an entire module on it for the course.

The Deaf community has a rich and, in many respects, fiercely protected cultural identity — and there are real debates around things like cochlear implants, mainstreaming in education, and the status of sign languages in official contexts.

I won't pretend to have a thorough grasp of all of it; I don't. But I'd compare it to learning Arabic without understanding its cultural and religious context. You can separate the two, but you'd be missing something important.

If you're going to learn sign language seriously, it's worth taking the time to understand the community whose language it is.

What Motivates People To Learn?

Something that moved me, when I sat down with our BSL teacher, was hearing about the everyday challenges deaf and hard-of-hearing people face in public spaces.

Something as simple as needing help in a public building becomes complicated when nobody around you shares your language.

Many people who work in public-facing roles — healthcare, retail, transport — feel a genuine sense of obligation to learn at least some sign language. Not because they're required to, but because they want to be able to help. That struck me as quite lovely.

It's a reminder that learning a language, any language, is fundamentally an act of reaching out to another person.

How To Learn Sign Language More Quickly

Now, to Alex's actual question: how do you speed things up when you only have one class a week?

The honest answer is that the same principles that apply to spoken languages apply here too. One session a week isn't enough if you want to make real progress — you need daily contact with the language.

Fortunately, sign language lends itself well to self-study. There are books with photographs of individual signs, and video resources online, which means you can learn new vocabulary independently without waiting for your next lesson.

My advice would be to focus on building your vocabulary. In spoken languages, one of the clearest paths to greater fluency is simply knowing more words — and I suspect the same is true in sign language.

If you spend even fifteen or twenty minutes a day practising new signs and reviewing ones you already know, you'll compound your progress significantly over time.

It's also worth looking for an online tutor to add a second session to your week. I'm not certain how many tutors specialise in German Sign Language specifically, but platforms like iTalki are worth exploring.

The broader principle is simple: add more touchpoints through the week, build your vocabulary steadily, and find ways to practise with other people whenever you can.

How To Learn Sign Language FAQ

Why You Should Learn Sign Language

I'll be honest: before I started looking into this, sign language wasn't really on my radar as a language learner. Now it is.

Alex's question — and the time I spent with our BSL teacher — reminded me that sign languages are fully formed, culturally rich, living languages, with all the complexity and history that entails.

They're also, as Alex himself discovered, genuinely fascinating. The fact that relatively few polyglots include a sign language in their repertoire makes it all the more interesting a path to explore.

If you're looking at how to learn sign language and wondering whether it's worth the effort — I think it absolutely is. The day you're able to communicate with someone who might otherwise have felt invisible to you is a day you won't forget.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.