Saturday, 11 February 2017

Teeline Shorthand is HARD

I've just spent the last month trying to learn shorthand. I've scoured Youtube for tutorial videos and practised the techniques for Teeline nearly every day. It's a complex language with indicative strokes to represent letters of the alphabet, designed to allow us to write words quicker. It's taken a long time to get to where I am, and I've not really got even the basics.

Shorthand Sue's videos were great, but there weren't that many of them. I soon found myself looking at Teeline Online, another youtuber making clear demonstrations of how to write the shorthand alphabet and how to put together some simple words. Strange shapes soon started to make sense, and squiggles slowly became readable information. Kinda. It's hard to learn but I'm starting to incorporate it into my own note taking systems. Putting words and sentences into their abbreviated form takes a lot of thinking about but I'm hoping I'll be able to keep practising.

Her videos start as demonstrations of the basics, then transcriptions of popular songs that play in the background. 


I thought this was a fun way of seeing how Teeline works. I hope she keeps uploading.

I still feel that I would need more of a detailed shape to indicate the original word than what Teeline suggests I would write, so for my own memory difficulties (improved note taking being why I'm trying to learn shorthand in the first place) I may need to adapt it slightly. But the initial constrictions of words that I've learned so far I expect will give me a little more ability and speed. I'm beginning to incorporate it into my handwriting already.

No comments: