How Learn ISL Works
Learn ISL is a free website for learning Indian Sign Language. After you sign in with Google, the home page shows a list of small themed collections we call sign packs: Going to School, Meals & Food, Hello & Thank You, that kind of thing. Each pack covers a few dozen signs and a handful of short sentences built from them.
You open a pack, work through the signs at your own pace, and decide as you go whether to just watch the reference clip or open your webcam and try the sign yourself. The site keeps track of which signs you have studied and practised. Two short daily features show up on the home page for days when you do not have time for a full pack.
Sign packs
Sign packs are how we organise the dictionary into something useful. A pack groups signs by everyday context, so words that you would actually need together appear together. Inside a pack are blocks of two kinds. A word block introduces the vocabulary for that context — Family Members, for example, gathers the signs for mother, father, sister, brother, and so on. A sentence block then shows how those signs combine into actual ISL sentences. Each entry in a sentence block pairs an English sentence (e.g. I go to the market to buy food) with its gloss, which is the written form of ISL: the signs you would actually make, in capitals, in the order you would make them. ISL word order is different from English, so the gloss for that sentence is ME GO MARKET BUY FOOD rather than the English order. The gloss is what you follow when you sign the sentence yourself.
Inside a lesson
There are three ways to start a lesson from a pack. Click a single block to study just those signs, choose All to walk through the entire pack in order, or choose Quick Mix for a shuffled set of as many signs as you pick, when you only have a minute.
A lesson plays one sign at a time. The card shows a short reference GIF, the English word, the same word in whichever language you set on your profile, and the original sentence if the sign came from one. You can replay the clip as many times as you like, expand it to full screen if the small size makes it hard to follow, and slow the playback down when it goes too fast. Some words can be signed in more than one way, and where our data has more than one variation, the card shows them all, and you can step through them with the arrows.
Below the card sits a button labelled Try practising this. Tap it and the webcam opens; after a short countdown it records you signing for a few seconds and uploads the clip on its own. A model trained on real ISL videos then looks at the recording and tells you whether it matched. The model is wrong sometimes, especially under poor light or at an odd camera angle, but it is right often enough to be a useful self-check. You decide on each sign whether to turn the camera on.
Daily Warm-up and Daily Challenge
Two short surfaces on the home page that show up every day.
The Daily Warm-up is five signs picked from the dictionary, fresh every twenty-four hours. About two minutes of review you can do over morning coffee. The pick is different every day.
The Daily Challenge is two short tasks per day, Crack a Sign and Craft a Sign. Crack a Sign shows you a clip of a sign and asks you to pick the right English word from four options. Craft a Sign then shows you a different word and asks you to sign it back to your camera. Complete either task and the day counts.
Streaks and reward points
The Daily Warm-up and the Daily Challenge each track how many days in a row you have done them, and that count sits right on the feature's own tile on the home page. The two are independent, because doing one on a given day does not mean you did the other.
Reward points are earned by finishing things rather than just opening them, and your total shows in the 💎 chip in the site header. You collect 10 points each time you complete every sign in a pack, and 5 points each time you finish a Daily Warm-up. The Favourites pack earns the same reward as any curated pack, provided it contains at least five favourites when you finish it, so starring a single sign and completing a one-sign pack earns nothing. Finishing the Daily Challenge keeps its streak going but adds no points, and looking a sign up from search or making a one-off practice attempt earns neither points nor a streak. Points are also a balance you can spend, and at the moment the one thing to spend them on is the streak freeze, which the next section explains.
Streak freeze
A single bad day should not wipe out weeks of habit, and streak freezes exist to make sure it does not. Everyone starts with six freezes. When you miss a day of the Daily Challenge or the Daily Warm-up while holding enough freezes, one is spent automatically to cover the missed day and the streak carries on unbroken. You do not have to do anything for this. Showing up again the next day is enough. Both daily streaks draw on the same supply, and when there are not enough freezes left to protect both, the Daily Challenge is saved first.
You can buy more freezes with reward points. Each one costs ten points, and you can hold at most six at a time. If a streak does break because you had run out, it can still be brought back. Once you have earned or bought enough freezes to cover every day in the gap, press Restore and the streak returns. A gap longer than six days is past saving, since six freezes is the most you can ever hold. Your freezes, the buy button, and any streak waiting to be restored all live on the Streak Freeze card in your Profile, where the activity calendar marks in blue the days a freeze saved.
Search and favourites
The magnifying-glass icon in the header opens the dictionary search. Type a word, click a result, and it opens straight as a Learn card. Useful when a specific sign comes up in conversation and you want to look it up. Star a sign while you are there and it goes into your Favourites, which then shows up as its own pack on the home page.
Sign-in and privacy
We use Google Sign-In. Your progress stays attached to your email, so you can study on a laptop in the morning and do the Daily Challenge on your phone in the evening, and the same streak agrees with both.
For your account we keep the signs you have studied, the signs you have practised, your daily activity for streak purposes, and the packs you have opened. For the site as a whole we use Google Analytics for anonymous traffic numbers like page views, country, and device. We do not sell your data or share it with advertisers.
When you practise a sign, your camera turns on; after a short 3-2-1 countdown you sign for a few seconds — the length is the Signing duration you set in your Profile (3, 5, 7 or 10 seconds) — and the clip then uploads to our server on its own so the model can check your attempt. We keep these practice clips to help improve the model over time, which is what the consent setting in your Profile controls: practising requires consent to be on, so if you turn it off you won't be able to record an attempt until you turn it back on. We never share clips with third parties.
Web and mobile
Learn ISL runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet, or phone. Native Android and iOS apps are in development. We will announce them on the home page when they are ready.