Shorthand

[pne]

I wonder whether it would be useful (and fun) to learn shorthand—mostly for taking private notes.

One disadvantage is that you’d have to pick a system; there are so many competing systems out there. And another one is that I probably wouldn’t want to learn two separate systems for English and German, the two languages I use most often, so ideally, I’d use one which works roughly equally well for both languages. (Which may not even be possible, due to the different phonological “shape” of the languages.)

Ah well.

Comments

[alsatia]

My high school had shorthand listed in the course catalog. I wanted to take it, but I was the only person out of 1100 or so who was interested, and they only offered a class if at least 5 people signed up. The guidance counselor handed me a textbook and said "Go study it at home." As you can probably guess, I never did.

The closest I came to taking notes in "shorthand" was to write them in Spanglish, using whichever language had the shorter word for what I was trying to write.