My economics and music teacher always wrote anything not for students in shorthand. It was her natural instinct, and had to actively think sometimes to correct herself. It was one of the most useful things she felt she learned in life. She gave me $300 after graduation when I met her at the library to give her an update on whats going on in my life. I don't think I've met a teacher that cared as much as she did. She always wanted a hug when old students saw her, and refuses to retire. I always make sure if I'm home to stop by to keep her updated on technology news and see what's going on in her life.<p>She's the only person to date that I have met that knows shorthand. She has an insane amount of crazy stories.
I've been teaching myself Gregg simplified since late last year. I probably put in 30 minutes a day, and an hour or two on the weekends.<p>First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it)<p>I currently can write about as fast as I type. Somewhere in the range of 40 - 80 WPM depending on how many complex words I need to use (those slow you down a lot more than common ones)<p>The biggest negative for me right now: reading. I can write it far faster than I can read it. For things like meeting notes,this pretty much rules shorthand out as I need to be able to flip through to find a particular meeting, or something important that someone said. This will get a lot easier with practice, but it's the biggest blocker for me at the moment.<p>I've made about 1000 flash cards in Anki for memorizing words, short forms, special rules, etc.<p>Very cool, but probably an obsolete technology in an era where recording is easy and typing is pretty good. I might feel differently as I improve, but that's how I feel now.
If anyone is intrigued by constructed scripts like shorthand, there are some more approachable, practical ones that don't need years of study.<p>The poet George Bernard Shaw was famously irritated by English orthography, especially spelling, and pushed for reform. To that end he first invented a phonetic transcription of English which he called Shavian [1] and published book written in it as a fun demonstration [2].<p>Starting with Shavian, Kingsley Read then improved the alphabet into a more practical form called Quikscript [3], a little more cursive and designed for handwriting. I've used it for journalling and there's a few users out there [4] if you search.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shaw-Alphabet-Androcles-Lion/dp/B0000CLLUK" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Shaw-Alphabet-Androcles-Lion/dp/B0000...</a><p>3. <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm</a><p>4. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript</a>
My mother taught Pitman shorthand (as well as related secretarial skills) for many years until probably the early nineties. My father still has many of her old textbooks, and some of them are <i>novels</i> translated into shorthand for reading and comprehension practice. They're kind of odd things to look at - page after page of squiggles that are somehow clearly artificial rather than natural orthography.<p>Also, it is interesting to encounter an encyclopedia article <i>explaining</i> something that was, until recently, common enough that its existence and usage was part of general knowledge. A useful reminder of how things change.
Growing up I was always astounded by how fast my Mother could take notes and remember so many details based on what looked like a bunch of crazy scribbles to me. I had always wanted to learn it but never took the time as I got older. Might be something worth checking out.
There's this for Gregg
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-Simplified/dp/0070245487/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1530647987&sr=8-2&keywords=shorthand" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-Simplified/dp/...</a><p>There's also handywrite (<a href="http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm</a>) which has the nice thing that the essence of it (not much different than gregg really) fits on an index card.
Any one knows a good (preferably free online) source for learning shorthand? I was recently interested in learning it, but was shocked by how little decent online material there is about it.
I've been looking into alphanumeric shorthand, it has the advantage of not learning new scripts or characters and easy with a keyboard. But then my keyboard layout (dvorak-iu) is not optimized for this and I have to redesign it as otherwise it might slow me down.<p>Another interesting one is Quickscript, technically not a shorthand but you can write quicker and it's phonetics based.<p>Yet another nice technique is using a specialized steno keyboard like Velotype keyboard (invented in my country)
My sister learnt pitmans shorthand while I had a book called teach yourself Dutton's speedwords that I studied to some degree. This guy's blog post on it is pretty good:
<a href="http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com/2014/01/dutton-speedwords-shorthand/#comments" rel="nofollow">http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com/2014/01/dutton-speedwords...</a>
Is there a good app or other ressource to learn shorthand? I want to learn it, for quite some time now, but haven‘t found any good approach without a training course...