Learning Steno: Day Seven

I got back on the horse today, after two days of being too busy. On the theory that almost knowing a chord will train me better, I turned off keyboard highlighting and chord display right from the start - and surprised myself by knowing about 80% of the letters without needing a hint. So on letters, I'm at 14 wpm and 94% accuracy in Fly. I call that really not too shabby after a single week, and I have nearly all of them memorized, actually. Amazing! Another week in this mode and I'm going to look harder at briefs.

For laughs, I took a look at Stenotypy (1914) in Google Books, and fired up Plover in a text window. Mirabai's right, the introduction is a pretty useful read, but the briefs (what I think they call the theory) are all different. So their exercises are useless with Plover. Ah well. It's still worth reading, if only because it dates from 1914 and was published in Indiana.

Here's a notion: let Plover know which windows it should be doing stenography in, and which it shouldn't. Just a thought.

Learning steno: Day Three

Still just chugging along in blind letter mode on Fly. I do a short warmup with the input chord and key highlighting displayed, then turn it off and see how many chords I can remember without looking. I'm getting better.

Interesting article in Wired on learning: recall is the best reinforcement, but it's most effective if you just barely recall the thing you're learning. Practice again too soon, and you're not learning as effectively as if you've nearly forgotten everything. I'm running Fly for ten minutes or so, twice a day, and I think it's probably about as effective as it could get.

Fly: chord memorization drill

I think the first thing I need to do is chord memorization. I'm finding that if the chord is displayed anywhere on the screen, I simply type the chord, without actually really thinking about the letter it represents - this is bad.

So what I can do is turn off the input chord display and letter highlighting; I keep the steno key display on because I'm still memorizing the key positions (although I have to admit I've nearly got them down after only about fifteen minutes' total practice). I can then re-enable input chord display when I get stuck, which at this point is essentially for any chord that's more than one letter, except Q = KW, which is easy.

The problem with this is I have to take my hands off the keyboard and click the mouse. It would be way better to hit a key combination and have a chord hint displayed for half a second, after which it would automatically disappear again. That shouldn't be too hard.

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.

Learning steno

The entire philosophy of stenography is fundamentally different from typing; it is phonetic and based on situational awareness of each phonetic chunk in the sentence as a whole. The stenography translator capitalizes sentences for you.

It's said that it takes six months to a year of practice to get to speed, but that speed is truly impressive. Words per minute on a QWERTY keyboard top out at around 120; on Dvorak, around 140. Voice to speech runs at about 180 wpm. Stenography permits the entry of English text at speeds between 240 and 300 words per minute!

So. You learn with:

• The Practice page on the Wiki
• Mirabai's steno lesson series (still short)
• Using Fly, if you're on Linux, and God willing, soon if you're on Windows
• Stenotypy, published in 1915. Things have, in fact, changed a lot since then.
• Hover Plover games, once they're written.