Please note that other countries' sign languages use different hand shapes and hand words than American Sign Language.  Therefore ASLSJ is not intended as an international sign language writing standard.

The following instructional material is designed to introduce you to the ASLSJ writing system.  It is presumed that you already understand the ASL manual alphabet.

In order to write ASL words, the English alphabet, numerals, and some punctuation are used to encode different facets of the body placement and movement.  Once these are memorized, you can figure out how to produce unknown spellings with your hands and potentially recognize the ASL word.  This is like sounding-out or decoding an English word using your voice.

ASL sentences are built within the space on and around the speaker.  The scene consists of player spaces and obstacle spaces.  These are setup in order of largest to smallest, with the primary player usually setup last.  Actions occur between the spaces in three dimensions.  Therefore many small English words like pronouns (he, she, it) and articles (a, an, the) are expressed as beginning and ending spaces.

Six geometric directions are consistently coded as d, i, o, r, s, and u: down, in (facing or toward body), out (away from body), near side (dominant-hand side), far side (non-dominant hand side), and up.  These can describe the direction of eye gaze, the rotation and yaw of a hand, the relative hand placement direction, a relative movement direction, or a relative repetition movement direction.

The linked subpages describe additional codes used in spelling ASLSJ words.