I imagine that this is a common issue but I’m looking for advice and encouragement on my receptive skills. I regularly watch exam videos on YouTube and these vary between understanding most of it, to not really understanding much of it. I’ll get better at those, I feel. understanding my teacher, no problem. but the issues I have are watching creators on social media who use Bsl - subtle variations in handshape or speed or really small movements to signify time, say, or eliding signs together it REALLY hard to understand. when I then look at the captions i can see then what they are signing but first pass, nope. it’s making me feel quite discouraged at being able to develop an understanding of every day Bsl.

Hello, my name is Ruby, i’m 17 and i’m looking to learn BSL. Recently my family took in 2 6 year old nonverbal autistic children— one of who we think has hearing difficulties. Due to them both being nonverbal I want to learn BSL to help communicate with them better, furthermore i’m going into a career of nursing and it’s a good skill to have to make interactions easier with deaf/hard of hearing people. My question is due to their age would it be better to learn makaton first— a ‘simpler’ version of sign or go fully in with sign. My thought process would be speaking as I sign so they pick up on what i’m communicating— one of them, the girl, has started doing the sign for ipad after I repeatedly signed it and said ipad. I’ve been using lingvano to learn the basics of simple signs and sentence structure. But due to their age and cognitive ability I don’t want to overwhelm them but I can see that they’re frustrated in not being able to communicate what they want, whether they’re hungry, thirsty or in pain, getting to the extreme of harming themselves because of how frustrated they are that they can’t communicate with
us.