
Shorthand - devchuk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
======
hhh
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.

She's the only person to date that I have met that knows shorthand. She has an
insane amount of crazy stories.

~~~
rovr138
My mom worked as a secretary and so did my grandma. They both know shorthand.

When you’re saying something to them and they’re taking notes, it’s amazing
how suddenly they’ll switch to shorthand even knowing that the notes are for
you or for someone that doesn’t know it. Interesting at the doctors office or
somewhere where we have to fill paperwork.

Interestingly, they have a hard time understanding each other’s sometimes.
There’s some basics that are fine, but each one has adds their own bit of
style I guess which makes it harder.

My moms signature is also weird. Her name has a g and she writes it weird
because of something in shorthand. That g made faking her signature a pain.
Then we learned teachers didn’t really notice.

------
gepoch
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.

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.

~~~
delinka
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.

~~~
gepoch
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 :)

------
imglorp
If 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].

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.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet)

2\. [https://www.amazon.com/Shaw-Alphabet-Androcles-
Lion/dp/B0000...](https://www.amazon.com/Shaw-Alphabet-Androcles-
Lion/dp/B0000CLLUK)

3\.
[http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm](http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm)

4\.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript](https://www.reddit.com/r/Quickscript)

~~~
stonogo
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.

~~~
cooper12
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...

------
andyjohnson0
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 _novels_ 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.

Also, it is interesting to encounter an encyclopedia article _explaining_
something that was, until recently, common enough that its existence and usage
was part of general knowledge. A useful reminder of how things change.

~~~
twiss
To be fair, there are also lots of Wikipedia articles explaining things that
are still common knowledge today:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen)

~~~
monkeynotes
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.

~~~
slantyyz
>> 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.

~~~
empath75
When I was in high school in the 90s, I took a typing class on actual
typewriters, and it was definitely taught with the idea of training people to
be secretaries and not software developers.

------
cponeill
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.

------
strainer
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.

~~~
delinka
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.

~~~
addingnumbers
Those criticisms are not specific to this method, indeed they are against
every possible form of shorthand.

------
drewcsillag
There's this for Gregg [https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-
Simplified/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/GREGG-Shorthand-Manual-
Simplified/dp/0070245487/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1530647987&sr=8-2&keywords=shorthand)

There's also handywrite
([http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm](http://www.alysion.org/handy/handywrite.htm))
which has the nice thing that the essence of it (not much different than gregg
really) fits on an index card.

------
emblaegh
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.

~~~
jdietrich
If it's for your own personal use, I'd suggest _Teeline Gold - The Course
Book_. Teeline isn't quite as efficient as Pitman or Gregg, but it's much
easier to learn. It's essentially a progressive enhancement of standard
handwriting and offers a useful improvement in speed even if you only
partially learn the system. It's the standard method taught on British
journalism courses, on the pragmatic basis that many journalists will
primarily rely on digital recorders and won't get the full benefit from a more
efficient but more difficult shorthand system.

[https://www.amazon.com/Teeline-Gold-Coursebook-Jean-
Clarkson...](https://www.amazon.com/Teeline-Gold-Coursebook-Jean-
Clarkson/dp/043545353X/)

------
fsiefken
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.

Another interesting one is Quickscript, technically not a shorthand but you
can write quicker and it's phonetics based.

Yet another nice technique is using a specialized steno keyboard like Velotype
keyboard (invented in my country)

------
barking
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: [http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com/2014/01/dutton-
speedwords...](http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com/2014/01/dutton-speedwords-
shorthand/#comments)

------
tigerlily
I wonder what the fastest achievable words per minute is with a modern
shorthand?

~~~
js8
In Czech Wikipedia, they mention a Czech record from 1957 of 200 words/min.
They compare normal writing 20-40 words/min, normal speech 70 words/min, TV
speech 80-100 words/min.

So a well-designed modern shorthand could probably go over 200 words/min.

~~~
adrianN
20-40 words/min is pretty fast for normal writing.

------
happyvalley
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...

~~~
pjonesdotca
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand)

