Shorthand

[Hans Solo]

Well, I sy that itrst tpc.  Myb I wl tch u smdy.

(oh come on Nay, I could't resist)

Han

[Telos]

When a Japanese person learns English, is the material they learn from printed in Japanese "script" or in the English alphabet.  Or do they do the same thing and write our words in Japanese symbols to learn to speak the language.

Now you've got me very curious! I've never really researched how the Japanese learn English. They do learn it at a young age, however, as it's a required course for most of their years in schooling.

As you may know, there are no "L" or "TH" phonemes in Japanese, so they have no script. So a Japanese will never learn the sounds "L" and "TH" if he/she writes foreign words in Japanese script. The pronunciation and the alphabet are that attached. I wonder to what extent the English alphabet is used in beginning courses, because some Japanese learn the L and TH pretty well, but others don't. There are studies that suggest that if you don't learn these (or other) sounds when you are extremely young, you'll probably never use them.

I had brought up Japanese because reading shorthand is like reading a smattering of consonants and syllables, and it reminded of the "butchering" of English pronunciation that's required for use in Japanese.

Thank you for your help.

[Edit: Oh, and now that I give it a second look, I'm actually wrong about hell and hair. The pronunciation is a little different ("he-ru" and "hei-ru" respectively) although there are other examples that demonstrate what I was trying to.. for some reason a good one is escaping me]

Han, that was pretty funny.

[RJA]

I learned shorthand in high school (I took two semesters of it because my girlfriend took it).  I don't remember what style it is (Forkner or Gregg rings a bell).  It's actually come in quite useful throughout the years.

Learning shorthand takes practice because the various symbols and abbrieviations have to become second nature.

If you're not concerned about knowing an "official" shorthand, I'd suggest you make up your own and then practice it until it becomes second nature.  Start by identifying the various "sounds", words, phrases, and letter combinations that occur most freqently in your writing such as "ing", "and", "ed", "the", "tion" and then come up with simple notations to substitute in for those.  For example the word "the" becomes a dash, the sound "ing", usually at the end of a word becomes a smile, "out-of-body" becomes oob, etc.  A captial letter can mean one sound (such as "St") whereas a small one doesn't.  Avoid dotting i's or crossing t's.  Use little shortcuts to denote each different vowel sound so you don't have to write out vowels or combinations of them.  Make your shortcuts simple lines and symbols that can be written with one stroke without lifting the pencil.

Start with just a couple shortcuts and keep adding more as you get comfortable and as they become automatic.  Don't forget to go back and re-read your text frequently for practice so that reading your own shorthand becomes automatic also.

[PresNevins]

A year or two ago I spent some time working on learning Gregg shorthand. Mostly I wanted to use it for the Morning Pages that I was writing then (a technique from the book The Artist's Way where you start the day off by writing three longhand pages of anything, as a way of "opening the channels" for more consistent creativity). The problem was that three pages of longhand was taking me forever, every morning.

So I worked on learning Gregg shorthand and got reasonably OK at it, but ran into a second problem: I could write in shorthand, and mostly   read back what I wrote, but only very slowly. Soon I discovered that my Morning Pages writing and journal writing and whatever I wrote in shorthand began to slow to a trickle. I needed to practice it to get more proficient so I used it in my daily life, but trying to use something that I have only limited skills with is difficult. If I look at my journals from that time, the entries in shorthand get briefer and briefer, until I finally snapped and returned to writing in longhand.

I just wish there were more resources available for _practicing_ shorthand, the way there used to be Gregg magazines back in the 50s or whenever. Unfortunately shorthand fell out of popularity before the web got going, so online resources are few and far between. If you buy a book on shorthand, basically you've already got everything that's available on the web and more. I wish somebody had a scanned archive of their shorthand magazine collection online or something. The handful of Gregg books that are still in print are prohibitively expensive to just buy casually, and using my own shaky shorthand writing to practice my reading is very much a case of the blind (me) leading the blind (me).

So I guess what I'm saying is, I think learning a shorthand system is good idea, but I'm personally stumped as to finding enough resources to make a good go at it.

Pres

[Telos]

RJA and PresNevins, thank you for your posts.

And welcome to the forum, PresNevins! I know just what you mean about the blind leading the blind... I think you'll find a significant amount of that here. ;)