The availability of video format sign language corpora limited. This leads to a desire for techniques which do not rely on large, fully-labelled datasets. This paper covers various methods for learning sign either from small data sets or from those without ground truth labels. To avoid non-trivial tracking issues; sign detection is investigated using volumetric spatio-temporal features. Following this the advantages of recognising the component parts of sign rather than the signs themselves is demonstrated and finally the idea of using a weakly labelled data set is considered and results shown for work in this area.