American Sign Language: Happy & Sad

Series Summary

Sign language, an often overlooked language, is incredibly beneficial to know and fun to learn. American sign language is very easy to learn for native English speakers and requires only a modicum of dedication, but the benefits of knowing sign language are immense. Imagine being able to communicate with someone who is often ignored because they cannot hear or speak the same language as those around them. Those who are hearing impaired deal with this on a daily basis. Imagine what an impact it could make their lives to have one more person connect with them by speaking their language. Most likely that would come naturally for you if you only knew how to sign. In this free video series our expert will teach you how to sign words for emotions in American sign language. You will learn the signs for words like happy, sad, angry and jealous. You will also learn how to sign words for confused, excited and bored. If you are interested in learning how to sign this series of videos is a great way to increase your sign language vocabulary.

Video Transcript

"Now we'll go over emotions. There are many different ways that you can sign emotions to show that someone is happy or sad. You want to make sure that you incorporate facial expression, and how you use your facial expression will show your true feelings. Let's start with happy. Happy, happy; that's the basic sign that we'll learn first. Now we want to incorporate facial expressions to show different levels of happiness. If you're feeling just general happiness, you might just sign "I'm happy to do this," happy. Another way that you might use it, is to show that you are very happy about something. "I am SO happy." Do you notice the facial expression and how it changes? Happy, happy, happy or excited, I'm thrilled! I'm so happy. Now we'll go over sad. This is the basic sign for sad, and you'll show that in your face as well. You want to make sure you emphasize those facial expressions, it'll be good to practice those -- the signs and the facial expressions. Good job!"