How Claude.ai helped me learn sign language
When I tell people that my parents are deaf, the usual reaction is: Oh, so you must speak sign language. But I don't, for various reasons I won't get into here. We communicate in spoken language, they read my lips.
The older I get, the more it bothers me that I never learnt my de facto maternal language. But it is one of those big life efforts that I "never quite got around" to do.
The resources to learn sign language exist. There are books, courses and online dictionaries. But lack of time (and organisational skills, let's be honest) kept me from taking advantage of them. What I needed was a solution that could work within my existing habits.
Building My Personal Sign Language Tutor
This is where Claude comes into play. With the ChatGPT type chatbot I was able to tinker a solution to study, even with my fairly busy life.
I used Anki, a digital flashcard app, to study for exams – now I use it to memorise anything I want to remember. It works like this: You create (or download) digital flashcards with content you want to learn, then you use the app every day to study and make the learning happen. This is already a daily habit, so not much additional effort.
There is a lot of downloadable content for Anki – but not for the sign language I want to learn. Creating a deck of flashcards (with videos, since it's a visual language) manually was just something I didn't know how to even approach.
With the help of Claude, I did the following:
- I took a list of the 625 most common words in any language
- With the help of Claude wrote a script in Python that ...
- Automatically translates these words to German
- Looks for all these words in an online dictionary for this sign language
- Downloads all these videos
- Creates Anki flashcards for each one where on one side is the word and on the other a video of somebody showing the sign (the solution)
- And this in a format where I could import it into the Anki App with a few clicks
The result was a completely personalized learning system tailored to exactly what I needed.
When AI Serves Your Deeper Goals
Now I'm studying every day, slowly building a basic understanding in the language. I know, there's more to learning a language than learning the most common words – but it's a start.
I'm trying to make a broader point here: Especially for non-techies (or barely-techies like me) AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude can offer far more than just "productivity boosts". Instead of just polish e-mails, generating Linkedin content, or using them as search engine replacements (not the best idea), these tools can help us get closer to goals that truly matter to us.
This project has become much more than just learning vocabulary. Whenever I talk to my mom now I integrate the signs I know to accompany my words and I tell her about the new signs I learnt. We talk about different variations of signs and how the language has evolved over the decades. We're connecting on a new level. It's pretty cool.
Want to know more?
PS: If you're curious about the technical side of this (or have any other comments), write me an e-mail, I'm happy to talk about this further.