How to practise Auslan between classes (and actually retain it)

Why Auslan fades faster than you expect

Auslan is a visual-spatial language. Meaning is carried by handshape, orientation, location, movement and non-manual features such as facial expression — not one after another, but together, and in motion. That is what makes it expressive. It is also what makes it hard to store anywhere except in your own memory.

A spoken language gives you something to fall back on. Miss a week of Italian and you can still read your notes, because the writing system holds the language for you while you are not using it. Auslan has no everyday written form. What ends up in your notebook is a list of English words — the glosses — and a gloss is a label for a sign, not the sign itself. A still photograph of a handshape has the same problem: it captures one frozen moment of something defined by movement.

So the ordinary way people maintain a language between lessons simply isn’t available. If the only place a sign lives is in your head, and you never take it out, it goes.

Recognising a sign is not the same as producing one

This is the trap that catches most learners, and it is worth naming clearly. Watching a sign and thinking “yes, I know that one” feels like knowing it. It usually isn’t. Recognition is a much easier task than recall: the answer is in front of you, and all you have to do is agree with it.

Conversation asks for the opposite. Someone asks you a question and you have a second or two to produce the sign yourself, from nothing, with no prompt on screen. Plenty of learners can follow a class comfortably and still freeze the moment they have to sign back. That gap is not a sign you are bad at Auslan. It is the difference between two very different skills, and only one of them is built by watching.

Practice that makes you retrieve a sign — a question with the answer hidden, a prompt you have to respond to, a friend who signs something and waits — is what turns recognition into recall. Research on study methods has consistently found that being made to retrieve material produces stronger long-term memory than reviewing it again.

Short and regular beats long and occasional

The night before class is the worst possible time to do all your practice, and it is when most of it happens. Cramming a fortnight of revision into one session will get you through the lesson, but very little of it will still be there a month later.

Spreading the same total effort across many short sessions retains considerably more, which is one of the better-established findings in research on learning and memory. For Auslan the practical version is simple: a few minutes most days will hold more than an hour once a fortnight. Ten minutes you actually do beats an hour you keep meaning to schedule.

Note that this is about keeping what you have, not about how fast you pick things up in the first place. If you are trying to work out what to expect from your first few months, we cover that separately in our guide to how long it takes to learn Auslan.

What to practise between classes

Roughly in order of how much good each one does:

• Sign with people. Nothing else comes close. Deaf social groups, Auslan meet-ups and events run by Deaf organisations give you the one thing no resource can: real conversation, at real speed, with feedback attached. Even once a month changes what the rest of your practice is worth.
• Review your class material as video, not as a list. If your course provides recordings, use those. Watching the sign move is the only review that matches what you are trying to remember.
• Fingerspell everyday things. Street names, shopping lists, whatever is in front of you. It is the easiest Auslan practice to do alone and it keeps the two-handed alphabet fluent rather than laboured.
• Keep your face in it. It is easy to drift into signing with your hands alone when you practise on your own, but facial expression carries grammar in Auslan, so practising without it rehearses a habit you will have to undo.
• Use an app on the days none of that is possible. Which, realistically, is most days. This is the gap-filler, not the main event.

Why a class is still the part that teaches you

Everything above assumes you are learning from a Deaf teacher, and that assumption is doing a lot of work. Video can show you a sign produced correctly. It cannot watch you produce yours and tell you that your handshape has drifted, that your movement is too small, or that your face is saying something your hands are not. Only a person can do that, and a Deaf teacher is the person best placed to.

There is also the part that is not technique at all. Auslan belongs to the Australian Deaf community, and a class taught by a Deaf teacher carries the culture, etiquette and history along with the grammar. That is not an optional extra you can pick up later from a screen. If you have not found a course yet, our guide to Auslan courses and classes in Australia covers accredited training, community classes and what each one is good for.

Where an app fits

An app solves one specific problem, and it is worth being precise about which one. It does not teach you Auslan. What it does is keep you signing on the twelve days between one class and the next, when there is no teacher, no practice partner and no obvious way to revise.

That is the whole reason Auslearn exists. Signs are demonstrated on video by Deaf signers, because movement is part of the language; sessions are short enough to finish on a train; and the quizzes are built to make you recall a sign rather than simply watch one again. It is designed for consistency, which is the thing that quietly decides whether the signs are still there in six months. It is not designed to replace your teacher, and it will not make you fluent on its own. If you are weighing up options, we go through what to look for in an Auslan app in more detail.

Keeping Auslan after your course ends

The steepest drop-off is not between classes. It is after the last one. The structure disappears, the weekly deadline disappears, and for most people the signing stops within a couple of months without any conscious decision being made.

The fix is to arrange the next thing before you need it. Enrol in the following level while you are still signing regularly rather than after the gap has opened. Find a Deaf social group or a regular Auslan meet-up so the language has somewhere to go once there is no classroom. And keep a practice habit small enough that it survives a genuinely busy week — a habit you can do badly on a bad day is worth more than an ambitious one you abandon.

Auslan is not an unusually hard language to learn. It is an unusually easy one to lose, because it lives in use and nowhere else. The signs you keep are the ones you keep using.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I practise Auslan?

A few minutes most days retains more than one long session before class. Auslan is a visual and motor skill, and spreading practice across many short sessions produces better long-term recall than massing it into one sitting. Consistency matters more than session length: ten minutes you actually do beats an hour you keep postponing.

Why do I keep forgetting Auslan signs?

Usually because there is nothing to revise from. Auslan has no everyday written form, so a word list records the English gloss rather than the sign itself, and a still photograph cannot show movement. The other reason is that watching signs makes them feel familiar without making them retrievable, so a sign you would recognise instantly can still fail to come out when you need it.

How can I practise Auslan without a signing partner?

Some of it genuinely needs another person, so it is worth arranging Deaf community contact even if it is only occasional. On your own you can fingerspell everyday words, review your class material as video rather than notes, and quiz yourself so that you recall signs instead of only recognising them. Treat solo work as maintenance between conversations, not as a substitute for them.

Can I keep my Auslan up with an app alone?

No. An app can stop vocabulary slipping and keep a habit alive between classes, but it cannot tell you that your own signing is unclear, cannot hold a conversation with you, and cannot pass on the culture the language belongs to. Use one alongside classes taught by Deaf teachers and time spent with the Deaf community, never instead of them.

How do I stop losing Auslan after my course finishes?

Plan for the gap before it arrives. Enrol in the next level while you are still signing regularly, find a Deaf social group or Auslan meet-up so the language has somewhere to go, and keep a practice habit small enough to survive a busy week. The signs you keep are the ones you keep using.

Sources and further reading

The factual claims in this guide were checked against the following community, government and research sources.

• Auslan Signbank: Grammar — Macquarie University
• Learn Auslan: Beginner Classes — Deaf Connect
• Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning (NCER 2007-2004) — Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

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