As anyone who followed last month’s challenge will know, the biggest struggle of last month was blogging everyday. It seems it has continued in a similar vain this month for similar and very different reasons.
At the moment I have 24 signs that I have learnt in 6 days – something that I am managing quite well but I am still only learning 4 signs a day. This months challenge is having a very different effect on my day to day life at the moment with post it notes of signs slowly appearing around the flat and BF slowly finding his quiz master role everyday addictive. There is not much though to talk about – I really thought that even at this point it would be harder but it seems that using the flashsticks is quite effective.
I am still recovering as well after a crazy insane month of fruit and veg as well as the insane schedule to blog everyday. I have taken a rest for a couple of days and had the chance to finally catch up on admin and analytics to find something interesting – while I had more views this month, it was not significantly higher. I also went back through old blog posts only to shudder at the quality of them. Normally I love to have images carefully made and planned out and yet so many times I used the same images again and again as I was rushed off my feet each day.
So with all of that hard work I was putting out sub-par blogposts which were getting lower than average views and I was shattered doing it! A lot of the stress and strain of the challenge this month already has been more about the blogging than the BSL and that is not what I wanted with these projects.
With this in mind, along with the ever growing work load, I have decided to change my blogging schedule to be a lot more suitable for not only me but those who want to follow the project or get updates from other projects. Each week I am going to blog two times a week where one will be about the challenge and the other is open to cover updates, reviews and other one-off projects. I will still plan to have at least one vlog for each week of the project as well meaning that there will be two updates.
I must say that I have felt bad for not keeping the blogging up but with the vast amount of work building from other areas and the clear impact on quality I felt that it was much better to change it for the better.
In terms of learning BSL at the moment, it has been a lot of fun and useful. BF is so happy that now he can silently ask for bread and cheese (I wouldn’t be surprised if he googled how to sign for a cheese and ketchup sandwich very soon). I really have fallen in love with flash sticks – the ability to scan the post its and stick them anywhere is so cool. They have an incredible new app coming out that I also want to try – it lets you scan house hold items and it will tell you what it is in your chosen language. While that aspect might be for a premium service, when learning a language like BSL I can imagine how useful it would be! Hopefully I’ll get access very soon so that I can cover it this month but until then I still am happily plodding along with the current one.
I have found that quite a few signs are very different from the ones I was taught in Bournemouth – I have had to remember when BF is testing me that I need to remember which version I need to sign! Just like areas have accents, there are some signs that are regional and that is one of the issues with flash sticks as it will ignore the regional sign for the general one. One of the things I loved was how southwest signs London – it is the same sign for crazy as they feel it is crazy there. I would be interested in how flash sticks would sign London!
So tomorrow I will do my first vlog for this challenge and I am currently working on an interview with two incredible BSL based organisations that I am so excited to share!
Have you ever tried to blog everyday? How often do you blog? Are you more likely to follow this challenge now? Have you tried flash sticks or online videos to learn any BSL? Have you learnt a language with a partner? I would love to hear from you so leave a comment below!
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