1,000 Words to Sign is a practical, authoritative, and effective learning aid to American Sign Language, a beautiful, creative, and visual form of communication. In close-up photos with directional arrows, it covers numbers, the alphabet, days of the week, colors, and countries, along with the essential words that allow you to express yourself, understand others, and communicate clearly with precision and eloquence.

This book opens readers’ eyes to something they see all the time but take for granted: street signs. It is a portrait of the signs on modern English streets: what they look like, who and what they are for, how they link to English history and how they form part of life in multilingual England today. It describes how their shapes, materials, letters, vocabulary, and grammar differ from other forms of written English, using a framework based on linguistics, typography and writing systems research. It provides readable and entertaining insights into an important use of written English, illustrated with over 400 examples of street signs. The book represents a starting point for the study of street signs as an academic area in its own right.

Learning a new language is easier than you think! This informative book teaches you the basics of American Sign Language. As many as two million Americans communicate with American Sign Language, making it the third most-used language in the United States. American Sign Language uses easy-to-follow photographs to teach you the alphabet, numbers, and simple words and phrases. Divided into categories—such as animals, people, and pronouns—the book and accompanying flash cards show you how to use your hands to communicate. Once you've learned the alphabet, you'll build on that knowledge to learn the words for “friend,” “family,” and so much more! And when you see how the words for “chicken” and “cat” evoke a chicken opening and closing its beak and a cat stroking its whiskers, you'll truly understand how intuitive and enjoyable learning American Sign Language can be!

Simplified Signs presents a system of manual sign communication intended for special populations who have had limited success mastering spoken or full sign languages. It is the culmination of over twenty years of research and development by the authors. The Simplified Sign System has been developed and tested for ease of sign comprehension, memorization, and formation by limiting the complexity of the motor skills required to form each sign, and by ensuring that each sign visually resembles the meaning it conveys. Volume 1 outlines the research underpinning and informing the project, and places the Simplified Sign System in a wider context of sign usage, historically and by different populations. Volume 2 presents the lexicon of signs, totalling approximately 1000 signs, each with a clear illustration and a written description of how the sign is formed, as well as a memory aid that connects the sign visually to the meaning that it conveys. While the Simplified Sign System originally was developed to meet the needs of persons with intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, autism, or aphasia, it may also assist the communication needs of a wider audience – such as healthcare professionals, aid workers, military personnel , travellers or parents, and children who have not yet mastered spoken language. The system also has been shown to enhance learning for individuals studying a foreign language. Lucid and comprehensive, this work constitutes a valuable resource that will enhance the communicative interactions of many different people, and will be of great interest to researchers and educators alike.