The shorthand card arrived!
Friday, 10 September 2010 07:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneThe card that I had sent, addressed in shorthand, actually arrived!
I got a letter from my shorthand instructor, in which he mentioned that fact; here’s the relevant excerpt:
Click through to the Flickr page for a transcription of the text into German as well as for a translation into English (in the image description).
(The letter is written in features of both grade 1 and grade 2 contracted Stiefo, but with many word endings—which are often omitted in contracted Stiefo—included for clarity.)
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What a great story!!!
Date: Sunday, 19 June 2011 18:30 (UTC)Thanks in advance
Krzysztof Smirnow
Re: What a great story!!!
Date: Sunday, 19 June 2011 18:44 (UTC)Stiefo alphabet
Date: Wednesday, 31 August 2011 09:53 (UTC)Re: Stiefo alphabet
Date: Monday, 5 September 2011 17:45 (UTC)Re: Stiefo alphabet
Date: Tuesday, 17 July 2012 18:49 (UTC)Re: Stiefo alphabet
Date: Tuesday, 17 July 2012 19:36 (UTC)Not much these days, to be honest.
Though on the odd occasion where I do write something in German shorthand, it’ll be Stiefo.
which resources are you suggesting?
I’d definitely recommend getting the official manual (“Stiefografie, das Kurzschriftalfabet der deutschen Sprache. Lernanweisung für die Grundschrift”). Getting the self-study lessons (“Rationelle Stenografie. Anleitung zum Selbststudium”) will definitely also help.
I would suggest getting them not from the official source (who may be slow to fill orders at best or even completely unresponsive at worst) but from Rudi Bauer, who offers distance learning: http://stenografie-stiefografie.beepworld.de/fernstudium.htm . I don’t know whether he sells the manuals if you’re not also signing up for lesson correction services, but you could ask.
I did find the ability to ask a teacher questions invaluable; unfortunately, there’s no official dictionary or word list that I know of, so if the instructions seem to be ambiguous on how to write a given word, there’s no way to know what the official way to write it is, and asking an experienced user will, at least, hopefully give you a useful answer, even if it’s not completely official.
Depending on how quickly you want to write at the end, you might also want to get the manuals for stage 2 and/or 3, as well. I find that stage 2 (Aufbauschrift I) is fairly easy to learn and definitely worth considering; whether you want the additional briefness of stage 3 (Aufbauschrift II) is up to you.
Unfortunately, there is not only no dictionary that I know of, but in fact no other easily-attainable reading material at all!
When I started to learn English shorthand, I went for Gregg—and there, there is a fair bit of material that was published in Gregg shorthand. (Not only lots of manuals, but also magazine articles, for example. And if I had gone for Anniversary edition Gregg, there are even quite a few books published in it!)
Being able to read well-written shorthand is excellent for giving you a sense of what good shorthand looks like, in terms of proportions. And also it helps you to learn to read shorthand quickly—because what use are private notes that are quickly jotted down but take long to decipher, or minutes of a meeting that take forever to transcribe, simply because you can’t read shorthand as fluently as longhand!
There used to be a newsletter published by the association behind Stiefografie, but its heyday was over by the 80’s or so. And unlike, say, the Gregg Writer or its kind-of successor, Today’s Secretary, I think that the chances of getting hold of back issues of Der Blitz (as I think it was called) are slim to none, even on places such as eBay. A pity.
the two existing youtube videos (with some errors imho)
I never knew those existed! Thanks for bringing them to my attention. I’ll have to try to get around to watching them at some point.
and the schnupper-kurs from stiefo.de.
That’s what I started out with right at the beginning as well, but I was eventually frustrated by being severely limited in the words I could write due to the small number of sounds that are taught.
Stiefo reading material
Date: Tuesday, 17 July 2012 20:32 (UTC)Maybe I should try to post some self-made reading material occasionally, either here or on another blog.
I’ll add it to my big list :) (Meaning: unfortunately, better not hold your breath, but it could still happen this century.)
Stiefo YouTube videos
Date: Tuesday, 17 July 2012 20:27 (UTC)Having watched them, here are my notes:
* the self-study materials suggest slightly wider writing (when using squared paper, they suggest one square’s width for e, three squares’ width for u), but the narrower proportions in the video are also, in general readable.
* Writing Bänder as bendr seems like a simple mistake to me, though; you shouldn’t smudge the r against the nd like that but should definitely show an e by leaving a bit of space.
* Their d and n are badly proportioned and would get them into trouble if they went on to Aufbauschrift II, where their letters would look like qu and tsch, respectively. The d should start with a downward slope, and the n should end with one; they should not start with a “vertical” stroke. In other words, d and n should be smaller copies of pf and ng, respectively, emphatically not smaller copies of f and nd, respectively.
At least his r looks like a small cht, mostly, not like a small k; there, he has a slope in the middle rather than a more vertical line (which would turn it into an Aufbauschrift-II x).
(This is also where having a teacher comes in handy—they can correct your handwriting if you make your shapes wrong. Especially if that makes your letters confusable with ones you haven’t even learned yet but may want to learn in the future.)
* I don’t think you can write Geier that way; I would have written it with a vowel sign in the middle: g-ei-V-e-r.
Though here he says that “since in German, there can be no word like Gair, this shape must mean Geier”… here it would be good to have an official wordlist of shapes that have proven to be good representations of a particular word, that one can refer to and use in case of doubt.
There are shorthand systems where the official material is mostly guidelines and everyone can write as they please (Teeline comes to mind) and others where there is more emphasis on theory and writing in such a way that everybody writes a given word the same way (which also means that it’s a lot easier to read someone else’s shorthand!); Gregg is an example of the latter.
I don’t think I’ve seen information that Stiefo is explicitly one way or the other, but I’ve interpreted it as being more towards the latter camp, with only one “right” way for writing any given word… and in the basic script, that means a vowel sign between any two following vowels or diphthongs.
* On the k page, the final -e in kele could stand to be a bit more obvious: it should reach up to the middle line rather than ending about ¼ of the way up from the bottom. (He did a much clearer job with kole.)
* His ko'alition is actually ku'alition! The vowel sign should be below the writing line, not on it, and everything following it should then also be half a step further down. And while the vowel sign is kind of sloppily through the line (could be either on it or under it), everything after it is drawn clearly as if the vowel sign was on the line: that’s past sloppy and solidly into “wrong” territory.
* Writing und as nd is an Aufbauschrift I abbreviation; I don’t think that using this abbreviation in a Grundschrift text is justified. Similarly with leaving off the -en in lassen.
Or maybe he’s teaching you Aufbauschrift I right off the bat? That would be closer to what’s taught in an introductory German Unified Shorthand course… But then leben should IMO also be simply leb.
Perhaps he’s not teaching any particular level according to theory but simply what he uses, which is an eclectic mish-mash of what he has found to be useful?
* Then he uses a high dot for das, initial u- for zu, and final -u for -ung—also Aufbauschrift I. He really should be saying which level he is attempting to teach. (And he makes it sound as if you can drop arbitrary letters at the beginning of end of words—not so much IMO. The abbreviations are fixed, as I see it: you can’t make write ugend for Tugend, for example, simply by leaving off the first letter, since initial u- is just zu- if it’s an abbreviation at all.)
* On the n page, he writes out sie rather than using the abbreviation (a short horizontal line just below the writing line)—not consistent. If you’re going to use Aufbauschrift I, you should use all of it.
This also makes things easy to read, because then if you see a word written out that would otherwise be abbreviated, you know it’s a different word; for example, if you see mit written out then it must be mieten with an omitted infinitive ending -en, since if it had been the word mit it would have used the abbreviation. At least that’s my limited experience.
* On the p page, he doesn’t abbreviate -lich, even though that’s also in Aufbauschrift I.
* His papaja looks nearly like papeija; narrow and wide joins should be more clearly distinct, especially if wide joins are only about twice the width of a narrow one.
* I’ve never heard of joining Sie to the previous word (as in nenensi “nennen Sie” and übensi “üben Sie”.
Much of it is minor nits and gripes, but I think that his way of writing d and n is the worst; it interferes the most with my ability to read what he writes and I daresay is simply wrong: a bad habit he got into. Even the introduction available from the stiefo.de website mentions that d r n are all “rechtsschräg”! So I don’t know where he picked up that odd way of writing.