Frequently asked questions

ASL Buddy is an American Sign Language learning app for iPhone and iPad, built around the idea that ASL is learned together. It pairs structured courses, a 4,300+ sign video dictionary, and a science-backed spaced-repetition review system with private family and friend groups so you can learn alongside the specific people you want to sign with. It's a great fit for hearing parents and relatives of a Deaf or hard-of-hearing family member, self-directed beginners, couples and study buddies, and anyone who wants a serious daily study tool. You can use it entirely on your own, or invite your household to learn with you.

After you create an account, the app opens to five tabs along the bottom: Courses, Review, Dictionary, Social, and Profile. Courses is your structured lesson path by level; Review is your daily spaced-repetition practice and shows a badge with how many cards are due; Dictionary is a searchable reference for every sign; Social is for learning groups with family and friends; and Profile holds your account details and settings like quiz difficulty and review reminders. This conventional layout means you always know where lessons, practice, reference, social, and settings live.

No. The beginner courses are designed for someone who has never signed before, starting with meeting people, the fingerspelling alphabet, numbers, and your first everyday signs. Lessons follow a watch-then-produce flow and teach a manageable handful of signs at a time so you're never overwhelmed. ASL Building Blocks even starts by teaching the five parts every sign is made of — handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and facial expression — so your signing comes out clear from day one.

ASL Buddy is a native iOS app for iPhone and iPad, built with SwiftUI. The live camera fingerspelling practice needs a physical device with a working camera, and you'll be asked for camera permission the first time you use it. A web version and other platforms are being explored for the future, but iOS is the experience to plan around today, and it's the rich, fully offline-capable client.

Courses are shown in a filterable grid with progress rings and a level badge (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). Open any course to see its ordered lessons, an overall progress bar, and one smart button that reads Start Course, Continue, or Review Course depending on where you are. Each lesson teaches a small set of signs with real videos and ends with a checkpoint, and finishing a course shows a completion celebration. This gives you a clear, guided path rather than a disconnected pile of flashcards.

Twenty-three courses are live across three levels. Beginner courses include ASL Foundations, ASL Building Blocks, ASL Core: Essential Signs, Everyday ASL Conversations, and Into the Deaf World. Intermediate courses dig into grammar, classifiers, describing people and things, Deaf culture, food and dining, travel, health, money and time, and more. Advanced courses cover spatial grammar and verb agreement, advanced classifiers, fluent conversation and idioms, storytelling and literature, and specialized Medical & Healthcare and Professional tracks. Every lesson teaches with real sign videos and ends with checkpoint quizzes, and new lessons and signs arrive automatically as the catalog grows.

Both, on purpose. Receptive practice (watching a real sign video and recalling its meaning) builds the comprehension you need to follow what other people sign, while expressive practice (seeing a word and physically performing the sign) builds the active skill of signing yourself. Lessons and reviews schedule these as separate cards, and expressive prompts ask you to sign from memory, then reveal the video to check yourself. Training both directions is what lets you actually converse, not just read.

Fingerspelling is woven in from your very first course and reinforced with fingerspelling-decode quizzes, and there's live camera practice for the alphabet. The broader curriculum is designed to teach ASL grammar, facial grammar (the eyebrow raises and head tilts that carry meaning), and classifiers as central skills rather than afterthoughts, scaffolded a little at a time. Some of the deeper grammar and conversation content is still being built out, but the foundations, fingerspelling and beginner vocabulary, are available now.

It's designed to make you a strong, well-grounded learner, and it's honest about an app's limits. Comfortable everyday ASL communication typically takes a year or more of real effort, and self-paced apps generally plateau around the intermediate level, after which learning from a human teacher and the Deaf community becomes essential. ASL Buddy positions itself as a supplement to real Deaf-community contact, not a replacement, and weaves cultural awareness into the lessons. Think of it as the best-structured way to build your foundation and keep your vocabulary sharp.

ASL Buddy uses FSRS-6, the modern algorithm that powers Anki, to schedule each sign for review right before you'd forget it. As you learn signs in lessons or add them from the dictionary, they enter a queue, and a short daily session resurfaces exactly what's due, in both expressive and receptive directions. You attempt each card, reveal the answer, and grade yourself Forgot, Struggled, or Got It, and the schedule adapts. The Review tab shows your streak plus Today, Learned, and In Queue stats to keep the daily habit going.

The app never shows the answer alongside the prompt, so you always make an honest recall attempt before revealing it, the same proven approach Anki uses where a system can't automatically verify your answer. There's no incentive to cheat, because the only consequence of your grade is scheduling: mark a sign too easy and you'll see it less and then forget it; grade honestly and the algorithm keeps it in your memory. Accurate self-grading is genuinely in your own interest.

When you grade a card Forgot, it doesn't vanish until tomorrow, it gets re-queued a few positions back and reappears within the same session until you recall it, so a fresh blank gets cemented before you leave. Importantly, only your first grade of the day drives the long-term schedule; the in-session repeats are handled by FSRS-6's short-term memory model, so repeating a card within a session won't distort your future intervals.

Yes. Beyond the signs automatically queued when you complete a lesson, you can add any sign from the Dictionary to your reviews with the Add to My Reviews button on its detail page. This is perfect for the names, family signs, and everyday words that matter to your household. Each dictionary entry also shows a retention badge (New, Learning, Strong, Fading, Weak) so you can see how well you remember it and decide what to add. Note that favoriting a sign just bookmarks it, it doesn't create a review card on its own.

Not yet. The app currently targets a 90 percent chance of recall, the well-tested default for spaced repetition, and uses FSRS-6's research-trained parameters that work well out of the box. An adjustable retention setting (letting you trade more reviews for stronger retention) and per-user personalization that fits the schedule to your individual forgetting curve are both planned for later, and the app already keeps a complete review history to make that personalization possible without losing any data. For now it's intentionally kept simple.

Yes, for fingerspelling. Open Practice Fingerspelling from the Review tab and the app uses your front camera with on-device hand tracking to detect 21 points on your hand and recognize the letter you're forming, overlaying a live skeleton so you can see it's reading you correctly. You hold a handshape steady to lock it in, and the feedback is encouraging coaching, Show the letter, Hold it, Got it, with specific tips for look-alike letters rather than a blunt right or wrong. It currently covers the static alphabet letters; letters that require motion, like J and Z, aren't included yet.

No. All hand detection and sign recognition run entirely on your device using Apple's Vision framework, and no video or imagery ever leaves your phone. The only data that can ever be shared off-device is anonymous numeric landmark coordinates (the joint positions, never video), and only if you explicitly opt in to Help improve recognition. Privacy here is built into the architecture, not just promised in a policy, which makes camera practice comfortable to do at home with the family.

Lessons mix nine formats: watch a sign video and pick its meaning, see a word and choose the right video from a grid, type the meaning from memory, true/false checks, minimal-pair questions between near-identical signs, handshape and location parameter questions, fingerspelling decode (read a sequence of letter clips), match-the-pairs, and expressive prompts where you sign from memory and self-check. Recognition questions tend to come early and harder recall questions later. The variety exercises both comprehension and production instead of letting you coast on one format.

That's deliberate, because in ASL the signs people confuse are the ones that look alike. Rather than using random unrelated options you could eliminate at a glance, the app ranks candidate wrong answers by visual similarity in handshape, location, and movement, and serves the closest lookalikes appropriate to your difficulty. On harder settings, COW might pull in BULL and DONKEY. Forcing you to truly tell near-identical signs apart is where the real learning happens. Grading is always done against the true target sign, so it stays fair even though the options change each time.

In Profile you can set Quiz Difficulty to Easy, Medium, Hard, or Auto. The level controls how tricky the multiple-choice wrong answers are, from least-similar same-lesson signs up to the closest lookalikes across the whole dictionary. In Auto, the app reads how you answered your recent questions and adjusts the challenge up or down on its own, so beginners aren't overwhelmed and faster learners aren't bored, with no settings to fiddle with.

Create a group in the Social tab, then tap Invite. The standard iOS share sheet opens with a join link and a prewritten message, so you send it through your own Messages, Mail, or WhatsApp, right into the chat your family already uses. The same invite also works as a scannable QR code for in-person moments like scanning grandma's phone at Sunday dinner, and as a short typeable code like FRMK-2683. One link is multi-use, so a single invite in the family chat lets everyone join, and the app never touches your contacts.

Groups are private by design. There's no search, no directory, no public profiles, no follower graph, and no global leaderboards anywhere in the app, the only way into a group is to have its invite. Family and friend groups use a People I approve model, where you personally approve each person who asks to join, so even a forwarded link can't let someone in without your say-so. Class-style groups can use Anyone with the link to admit people instantly, but they're still unlisted and the owner can remove anyone.

Inside a group you get a shared streak that grows only when everyone reviews that day, a daily Sign of the Day for a common ritual, a member list with each person's streak and signs learned, cooperative challenges, Family Wordlists you can each add to your own reviews, and an activity feed. You can compare which signs you each know to see who can teach whom, gently wave at someone whose streak is about to lapse, and run live review sessions. Owners approve join requests and everyone sets their own sharing level.

A live review session is a video session, designed to run over a FaceTime call with SharePlay, where one person leads and one or more learners sign to the camera. The learner sees only the prompt and signs it; the leader sees that card's answer key (the reference video and how the sign is formed) and marks each attempt Got it, Struggled, or Missed. So you do not need to know ASL to lead, a hearing parent can quiz their child using the on-screen answer key. The marks flow into the learner's own spaced-repetition schedule, and a Practice only toggle keeps low-stakes rounds from affecting it.

The live review flow is built and you can try it today as a single-device demo that walks through the whole experience and still records your grades. Full multi-device sessions over SharePlay, where each person joins on their own device during a FaceTime call, turn on once the app is provisioned with an Apple Developer account, with no further changes needed. So you can explore exactly how it works now, with the fully synced multi-person version arriving as that provisioning lands.

Yes, and you control it. Each member sets a per-group sharing level: Full progress shows your stats and feed activity, while Counts only shows just your streak and how many signs you've learned. You can change it anytime, and the app never reveals which specific signs you struggle with outside a live session you chose to join. Sign comparison only uses per-sign data for members sharing at Full, and counts-only members are clearly labeled, so privacy is respected even within a close group.

There are intentionally no ranked leaderboards. Challenges default to cooperative or personal-best shapes, like a shared review-count pot the whole group fills together, or a course-completion goal that celebrates each finisher rather than ranking them. The group streak is all-for-one. An optional one-on-one race exists but is opt-in by the person challenged and expires quietly with no public declined event. The design deliberately avoids head-to-head framing in mixed-age family groups because it discourages exactly the learners the app most wants to keep going.

Individual plans are $4 per month, $40 per year, or $100 for three years. The Family plan, which covers up to 5 people, is $10 per month, $100 per year, or $250 for three years. The yearly options are the best everyday value, and the three-year options lock in the lowest long-run rate. The Family plan is especially worth it for households learning together, since most ASL learners are part of a group that all needs the same signs.

Because ASL is almost always learned as a group, over 90 percent of Deaf children are born to hearing parents, so the natural buyer is a household, not a lone individual. The Family plan covers up to 5 people for $10 per month, $100 per year, or $250 for three years, which is far cheaper than five individual subscriptions and unlocks the whole point of the app: learning together in a private group, comparing what you each know, and quizzing one another. One plan covers everyone in your circle.

Yes. At $40 per year for an individual, ASL Buddy sits well below the premium ASL course apps, which commonly run around $100 to $120 per year, while still offering a structured curriculum, a large video dictionary, and spaced repetition in one app. And no major competitor offers a true family plan or private group learning at all, so the $100-per-year, up-to-5-people Family plan is a value proposition you genuinely can't get elsewhere.

Yes, ASL Buddy is built offline-first. Course, lesson, quiz, and dictionary content is cached on your device, and your spaced-repetition reviews run on a local scheduler, so you can keep learning on a plane, a subway, or anywhere with no signal. Anything you do, grading reviews, finishing lessons, favoriting signs, changing settings, is held in a durable queue and synced automatically when you reconnect. The dictionary content bundle is tiny (about 1.7 MB), and sign videos stream over the network, so those specifically need a connection unless already cached.

No. Reviews are graded on your device using a full port of the FSRS-6 algorithm, and the scheduling math is deterministic, pinned by shared test fixtures, so your device computes the exact same next-review interval the server would. When you reconnect, your offline reviews sync up and the server simply confirms the same result rather than recomputing something different. You get a consistent, correct schedule whether you studied online or off, with no studied-offline-so-it-broke problem.

For existing users, almost nothing. The architecture is built so the server isn't in the path of your everyday studying, your 30-day login keeps you signed in, your downloaded content stays readable, and your actions keep queuing during an outage, syncing later. If your login happens to expire while you're offline, the app keeps your local data usable and re-authenticates on next contact rather than logging you out. The only things an outage blocks are brand-new signups and fresh logins.

Privacy is a core design stance. There are no public profiles, no discovery, and no global leaderboards, so you can't be found by strangers, and groups are private by invite only. Camera-based fingerspelling recognition runs entirely on your device and never uploads video. Inside groups, you choose your own sharing level and your per-sign weak spots never leave your device except in a live session you chose to join. Even the live video is designed to ride on FaceTime, which is end-to-end encrypted, so the most sensitive content never touches the app's servers.

You create an account with your name, email, and a password, or sign back in with your email and password. A secure token keeps you signed in across sessions and enables offline use, so your streak and review schedule follow you. Passwords are securely hashed and the login lasts 30 days, which is part of why the app keeps working smoothly even when you're offline or the server is briefly unavailable.

Yes. Your activity is recorded as events with unique IDs and timestamps, and the server reconciles everything by replaying that history in order, so studying on more than one device, even both offline at the same time, never corrupts or double-counts your progress. Both devices converge on the same final review schedule. Your learning history stays consistent wherever you study.

Yes. Content is delivered as bundles that update quietly in the background, the app checks for changes, downloads only what's actually new, and swaps it in automatically, so you get added courses, new signs, and corrections without waiting for an App Store update or re-downloading anything you already have. The curriculum is actively expanding from the current beginner courses toward a full beginner-to-advanced catalog, so expect the content to keep growing.

Possibly, those are being explored, but today ASL Buddy is an iOS app for iPhone and iPad, and that's the platform to count on. A browser-based web version, an Apple TV living-room experience, and an Android port have all been considered in planning, but they are future directions rather than shipped products. For non-Apple family members who want to join a live review session, the plan keeps a door open via a shareable call link so they can be quizzed out loud even without the app.