An optn is t jst lv ot al vwls excpt at th bgnnng of wrds. Its qt esy t rd hwvr it mght nt be wrth it fr jst thrty prcnt incrs in wrd dnsty.
Shorthand
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: Shorthand
#22I'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.
First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it)
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)
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.
I've made about 1000 flash cards in Anki for memorizing words, short forms, special rules, etc.
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.
Re: Shorthand
#23An optn is t jst lv ot al vwls excpt at th bgnnng of wrds. Its qt esy t rd hwvr it mght nt be wrth it fr jst thrty prcnt incrs in wrd dnsty.
I don't find it "easy" to read that, but it's not impossible. And depending on personal levels of experience, eliminating vowels might take more effort than just writing full words.
Re: Shorthand
#24Is 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...
I'd recommend Teeline. It was developed for British journalists. I've used it off and on when I was a scrum-master to keep notes on standups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
Re: Shorthand
#25I'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. First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it) 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) The biggest negative for me right now:…
I think the original intent was to take notes quickly and later transcribe them to be read as normal text. I've wanted to learn shorthand for writing into my tablet and have it transcribe automatically, but I haven't put in the research to know if a translation app exists.
Re: Shorthand
#26I'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. First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it) 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) The biggest negative for me right now:…
I think the original intent was to take notes quickly and later transcribe them to be read as normal text. I've wanted to learn shorthand for writing into my tablet and have it transcribe automatically, but I haven't put in the research to know if a translation app exists.
Right, that's definitely the intent of shorthand, but it works better when you have someone dedicated to processing the captured conversation.
If I tried to transcribe my notes from every meeting, I would end up working on it for more time than the actual meeting took at this point.
I have thought about the exact same app actually. Being able to photograph my Gregg outlines and get an English transcription would be the dream.
Gregg and many other shorthands are purely phonetic. There's no difference between to, too, and two. You would need to do OCR on the outlines, map those to sounds, and map the sounds to possible words, then assemble a meaningful sentence based on what meanings make sense in context. A neural net could probably do a good job of mapping from outlines to possible words, and you could use NLP tools to try to choose a sentence from the possible outputs. It would be tricky to do well, for sure.
For now, it's vim for my meeting notes :)
Re: Shorthand
#27I'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. First of all, it's very fun (the main reason I got into it) 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) The biggest negative for me right now:…
I think the original intent was to take notes quickly and later transcribe them to be read as normal text. I've wanted to learn shorthand for writing into my tablet and have it transcribe automatically, but I haven't put in the research to know if a translation app exists.
> research to know if a translation app exists
You need something easy for a human to write and easy for a computer to decode.
I think Gregg is out for this reason, but so is graffiti (it's not fast enough right?).
Re: Shorthand
#28If anyone is intrigued by constructed scripts like shorthand, there are some more approachable, practical ones that don't need years of study. 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]. St…
The Shavian alphabet and the book published using it both occurred after Shaw died. His estate funded a trust to accomplish those things; Shaw never saw either.
Re: Shorthand
#29If anyone is intrigued by constructed scripts like shorthand, there are some more approachable, practical ones that don't need years of study. 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]. St…
The Shavian alphabet and the book published using it both occurred after Shaw died. His estate funded a trust to accomplish those things; Shaw never saw either.
The sad part is that Shaw devoted a sizable part of his estate towards establishing the script, but after debtors and everyone else was done with it, there were only enough funds to publish one book (Shaw's Androcles and the Lion)... To think we might have made maybe even a tiny step towards English orthography reform...
Re: Shorthand
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, there are also lots of Wikipedia articles explaining things that are still common knowledge today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen
I don't think the point was that Wikipedia exclusively documents obscure knowledge that used to be common. Wikipedia obviously contains information about all the things, but shorthand used to be very common and it's funny to see it now observed as a curiosity on HN and referenced on Wikipedia.
>> shorthand used to be very common and it's funny to see it now observed as a curiosity on HN
Seeing this Wikipedia link made me feel old.
Shorthand was indeed very common, my older sister took Pitman shorthand courses in high school, but by the time I hit high school in the mid 80s, it was no longer offered at my school. By the time the 90s rolled around, it was probably a dying craft. Heck, in the early 90s, I had a summer job using a dedicated Wang word processing machine, typing out paper memos using a dictaphone (remember those?).
As I get older, I find it interesting when younger generations find novelty in things from my younger days, like hollerith cards, walkmen, vinyl, and film cameras.