Ah, finally I will be able to understand my doctor's handwriting.
Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#12I can’t even read my own cursive, so I can’t imagine how illegible my shorthand cursive would be. Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive? One can always hope…
I use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am getting better though.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#13I can’t even read my own cursive, so I can’t imagine how illegible my shorthand cursive would be. Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive? One can always hope…
I use Orthic to jot down notes. It has been perhaps two years since I implemented it. I view it as a tradeoff - it is way easier and faster to write… but harder and slower to read. This is why I use it for brief notes primarily. Perhaps the most consistent issue is mixing up the letters “e” and “u” but there are other ambiguities that creep up too, so sometimes you have to read a word a few times. I think I am gettin…
Oh yes, and it takes up way less space, so it is very economical, you can cram a lot of notes into a single page of a pocket-sized notebook
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#14I can’t even read my own cursive, so I can’t imagine how illegible my shorthand cursive would be. Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive? One can always hope…
I have some experience with a German shorthand style (DEK) and it is more important to write clearly. Shorthand removes most of the redundant information that is present in regular alphabets and words. With regular writing, a small error somewhere can be error corrected using the surrounding context.
When I wasn't being careful, I could often read the text shortly after I wrote it, but after a few hours or days it became illegible to me.
There are multiple levels of shorthand, the faster ones drop more and more information from each word if it can be inferred from the context (for someone familiar with the topic, i.e. yourself mainly).
Shorthand never really stuck for me. Learning to write and read it wasn't that difficult actually, but I couldn't quickly scan shorthand notes like I could with regular writing. I suppose that's a matter of practice and I wasn't ready to sink hundreds of hours into just that. One thing I learned from the experience was how frustrating of an experience it is if you're not good at reading. I have always been an above average reader and I couldn't understand how people struggled so much with it. Reading shorthand was effortful and slow, especially at the very beginning for me and that gave me some perspective of how some of my classmates must have felt.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#15I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…
Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
Japanese isn't compact. It generally uses fewer characters to convey the same meaning (unless the sentence is full of loanwords from English), however the problem is that the characters are usually written significantly larger than Latin characters, simply because they're so much more complex, so the amount of actual space on the page comes out roughly the same.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#16I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…
Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
> Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish)
Do you have a citation for that? I know some Swedish and often need to read documents in it and I don't get the impression that it's any more compact than English.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
Japanese isn't compact. It generally uses fewer characters to convey the same meaning (unless the sentence is full of loanwords from English), however the problem is that the characters are usually written significantly larger than Latin characters, simply because they're so much more complex, so the amount of actual space on the page comes out roughly the same.
Han characters are of course much larger than Latin characters, but the resulting space usage is more nuanced AFAIK. My data about the relative compactness of languages mostly comes from localization researches [1], and I believe CJK is generally more compact even when such differences are accounted for (but the actual expansion ratio can greatly vary).
[1] Search for "text expansion translation" to get the general idea. I've mainly referred to the guideline from https://eriksen.com/language/text-expansion/ but many other guidelines agree. See https://www.w3.org/International/articles/article-text-size.... about the general phenomenon.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#18I can’t even read my own cursive, so I can’t imagine how illegible my shorthand cursive would be. Does anyone have any experience with this that suggests that maybe it can be clearer than cursive? One can always hope…
I have found my cursive hand getting much better after spending some time with Gregg shorthand. The emphasis on curve and proportion in Gregg has made my cursive hand much more regular, flowing and pleasing to the eye. I’m sure similar benefits would accrue to learning and practising Orthic where specific curves, angles and joins have meaning.
oh interesting, i had the opposite experience. my handwriting has always been barely legible and after i started experimenting with gregg it became so much worse!
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#19I learnt Pittman shorthand (and some Greg), and taught it to my kids as a "secret code". They use it in class to jot notes the teacher cannot read :) Both of these make the writing faster, but reading slower. I once spoke the world's champion shorthand writer - I've forgotten her name. She said the even she cannot read shorthand as fast as regular text. Which made sense before computers, when a stenographer needs to…
Use other languages, perhaps? English is a relatively compact language in terms of visual space, but there are even more compact languages. Typical examples include East Asian languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and Nordic languages (Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish).
Sorry, no, Nordic languages are not compact. They may stuff more words together (e.g. generalforsamling instead of general/annual meeting), but just putting two words together doesn't make it more compact or easier to read.
Re: Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japanese isn't compact. It generally uses fewer characters to convey the same meaning (unless the sentence is full of loanwords from English), however the problem is that the characters are usually written significantly larger than Latin characters, simply because they're so much more complex, so the amount of actual space on the page comes out roughly the same.
Han characters are of course much larger than Latin characters, but the resulting space usage is more nuanced AFAIK. My data about the relative compactness of languages mostly comes from localization researches [1], and I believe CJK is generally more compact even when such differences are accounted for (but the actual expansion ratio can greatly vary). [1] Search for "text expansion translation" to get the general i…
The only thing that was correct in your link regarding Japanese is "varies".
As for Han characters, Chinese uses those. Japanese uses a mixture of kanji (ancient Chinese characters) and native phonetic characters. So the space needed really depends on the content. As I said before, if it's full of English loanwords (or worse, English technical terminology that's been adopted into Japanese), it'll likely be larger, since all that is expressed in katakana (phonetic characters). If it's something that can be written in mostly kanji, then it'll be quite compact.
Korean does not use Han characters at all. It uses Hangul, an artificial phonetic writing system invented about 100 years ago.