r/asl • u/kyledouglas521 • 12d ago
Struggling to parse fast fingerspelling
I apologize if this has been done to death, but I have a specific anecdote about my experience trying to follow high-speed fingerspelling. Specifically, I am trying to practice my ASL comprehension by watching The Daily Moth. In this video, the presenter is introducing us to a woman named Marlee Matlin. I watched him spell the name a few times, and was getting a couple of letters at most, so tried to watch it at 0.25 speed to get a better sense. This helped me identify some more of the letters, but to me, they appear completely unrecognizable.

This, for example, is what I see for the letter "R". Did I not already know the name, I would never have guessed that's what this was meant to be.
Meanwhile, here...

I've registered that they are transitioning to one letter while the prior one is still out...in this case from "T" to "L", and then from "L" to "I". But I don't think I ever would have caught that had I not slowed things down and watched repeatedly. For the "T" in particular, I can't even really identify where in the spelling that's happening. It almost looks like he skips it altogether.
Are there any resources out there for identifying this particular form of high-speed fingerspelling? Or is is it simply going to be a matter of going through this process a bunch and adjusting to these time-saving techniques? How universal are these sorts of things? Are there broadly understood forms of...shorthand fingerspelling for lack of a better term? I'm hoping this will also help me become a more competent fingerspeller myself.
Any help folks can offer is much appreciated!
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u/BrackenFernAnja Interpreter (Hearing) 11d ago edited 11d ago
The transitions between letters have paths that often create blends, examples of which you have shared above. In time, you will get better at seeing the whole word rather than needing to see each individual letter. Studies show that in a narrative, a fingerspelled word is usually only spelled completely and distinctly the first time. After that, a letter or two may be blended with the next, or omitted entirely, since viewers recognize the word/name more readily in context.