Learning steno, Day One

Right now I'm just going through the Fly letter mode to get a feel for where the keys are. I did about ten minutes earlier, and my goal is to spend maybe half an hour each day, which I will deduct from my Reddit time, so no freaking harm done.

As a note - I thought I was a fast typist. In fact, I know I'm a fast typist. I'm just ... not as fast as I thought. 75-85 wpm. In fact:

There's the two badges I just earned at the first response on Google if you want to try it as well. Let's just say my typical typing speed, when focused, is about 80 wpm.

Here's the thing. My income as a technical translator depends almost entirely on my typing speed. I translate about 4000 words per nominal day. At 80 wpm, that's 50 minutes of typing, but of course I can't actually maintain that speed (I felt as though my speed on the test was faster than usual, more fluid - and I spend a lot of time correcting mistakes, which I didn't bother with on the test; steno is reportedly more accurate due to its built-in understanding that you're typing English). 4000 words takes me four to five hours, mostly due to fatigue and boredom; depending on the source text, surprisingly little of that time is spent looking up terminology.

My feeling (and my hope) is that faster typing will increase my throughput and comfort, allowing me to handle more words per day comfortably. Because if it's day in and day out, comfort is paramount.

The only thing I've done during my translation career to improve throughput is a typing accelerator, which I use for words I see often. What "often" means varies. I hope to replace the typing accelerator with Plover, actually (which means I'll be subverting Plover to a certain extent), and we'll see just how difficult that ends up being. But when I started to use the typing accelerator, my output increased sharply, by about 20%. Hence my great hope for steno.

So, Day One. 80 wpm on qwerty, and that's my goal for steno, as quickly as possible.