 This is grade 1 braille in one lesson. Braille is based upon a grid of dots small enough to fit under the tip of your finger. These dots are numbered 1 through 6, and when raised in different combinations represent different letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Each braille character or cell can be described by saying which of the dots are raised in that cell. For instance, this is a one cell, this is a two-five cell, this is a three-four-six cell, and this is a one-two-three-four-five-six cell, otherwise known as a full cell. Braille is actually very easy to learn. Most of it is based upon the first ten letters of the alphabet, A through J, and these letters only use the top four dots in each cell. Because of the importance of these particular letters, we'll spend just a minute trying to memorize them, and we'll do that with a story. One day you decide you want to cross a river. So you approach a bridge, but it's closed. So you take the detour, but realize you're on empty. So you fill up with fuel, but now you're in gridlock. So you trade your car for a Harley, turn the ignition on, and jump over the river. Each of these words begins with the letters A through J, and each of the symbols represent the raised dots within each letter. Let's go through the story one more time. You approach a bridge, but it's closed. So you take the detour, but realize you're on empty. So you fill up with fuel, but now you're in gridlock. So you trade your car for a Harley, turn the ignition on, and jump over the river. This same pattern of dots used for letters A through J is repeated over and over again in Braille with just a few small changes. If you can remember letters A through J, you've pretty much learned Braille. So let's take away the symbols and add two more rows of cells that have the exact same pattern of dots as letters A through J. We'll use the second row to represent letters K through T. And to make these cells different than the first row, we'll also raise dot three. For letters U through Z, we do the same thing, except we raise both dot three and dot six. For now, we'll discard the rest of the cells on this row as we won't see them again until we get to grade two, Braille. But wait, what about the letter W? Well, Braille was invented by a French teenager, and in classical French, W isn't used. However, it was added as a special character later. For now, we'll simply add it to the end of the third row and put it in its proper place when we come to grade two, Braille. We now have all 26 letters of the alphabet in Braille. So let's look at numbers. We've already used 26 out of the possible 64 Braille characters that can be created out of six raised dots. So let's reuse letters A through J for numbers one through nine plus zero. But wait a minute, when we read these characters, how do we know if they represent letters or numbers? Well, there's actually a special character that will come before a set of numbers that will let you know that, hey, these next set of characters are actually to be treated as numbers. So let's move over the cells that we have created so far and make room for this special character. And here it is. This basically looks like a backwards L, but think of it as turning letters into numbers. Once it's on, it stays on, and all the characters you read after this character are considered numbers. But what if we want to go back to using letters? Well, we just use another special character to turn off the numbers and go back to letters. So what about capitalizing letters? Everything we have seen so far is lower case. If we want to capitalize something, we just use a very simple Braille character, and it's just the number 6 dot raised. The character that immediately follows this character is considered capitalized. This isn't like with the number symbol where once it's on, it stays on. The capitalized character only works for the very next character. So now we have our letters and numbers, but no punctuation marks. In Grade 1 Braille, these are the only types of characters you will encounter, letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Grade 2 Braille is meant for more advanced Braille readers, and condenses multiple letters or even whole words into a single character. Grade 2 Braille allows Braille books to be shorter than they otherwise would be if they were written entirely in Grade 1 Braille. So to finish up Grade 1 Braille, we will need to look at the cells that represent punctuation marks. Most of the standard punctuation marks can be found along another row of cells that are also a variation on the raised dots in letters A through J. So let's move up the cells that we've looked at so far and make room for this additional row of cells. This time, instead of raising an extra dot to differentiate these cells from letters A through J, we're actually going to move all the raised dots in this row down one position. The punctuation marks on this row don't follow any particular pattern, but they are still fairly easy to memorize, and here they are. Some of these cells represent multiple punctuation marks at the same time, such as the open quote in the question mark. The fifth character doesn't represent a punctuation mark, but we'll keep it in here for consistency's sake. Finally, on the left-hand side is another punctuation mark that doesn't fit the same pattern of raised dots, and that is the decimal point. So now we're looking at all the cells used in Grade 1 Braille. So based upon what we've learned, see if you can tell what word is represented by these cells. Feel free to pause the video if you'd like. So the first two cells we know are from letters A through J, because only the top four dots are raised. The third cell is from the second row of letters K through T, because dot three is also raised. So let's take a sneak peek back to all of our cells again. And as you may have guessed, these are the cells that represent the word cat. Let's try another one. The first two cells we know are from letters A through J, because only the top four dots are used. The next two cells are from letters K through T, because dot three is also raised. And the final cell is from letters U through Z, since dot three and dot six are also raised. So let's take a sneak peek back to all of our cells again. And so if you guessed correctly, then you came up with the word jelly. Our final example is only three cells long. The first cell we can tell is different than the others. If you'll remember, when we encounter a cell with a pattern of raised dots that is shaped like a backwards L, it means we are turning letters into numbers. So the next two cells are from letters A through J, except we are going to read them as numbers. So let's take a sneak peek back to all of our cells again. And then we'll see that this is actually the series of cells that represent the number 64, which also happens to be the total number of cells used in Braille. And we'll look at the rest of these cells in the video for grade two Braille. Now you've learned grade one Braille in one lesson.