Learning Shorthand

For those of you who might not know, I'm heading into my final year of university where I'm studying Magazine Journalism. A recommended, though not compulsory subject to take alongside this is Shorthand, which I started learning last year. From my knowledge there are many different types of shorthand, but the one we are under strict instructions to learn is called Teeline. If you don't know what shorthand is, it's essentially self descriptive, it's just writing but instead of using words you use symbols to write things more quickly.

When I first starting taking shorthand classes I thought it was the most confusing thing in the world. The alphabet is pretty easy to learn, but once you get passed that everything seems to get a million times harder. It's a requirement if you take shorthand to get up to 100 words per minute, and that is way more difficult than it sounds. After a couple of months of learning it, I started to get into a groove, but there are rules for different word endings, and in some cases the rules don't apply. Trying to get your head around all of these things is the hardest, but once you know the theory practice is the key.

The way shorthand is marked is a little bit strange too. A passage is read out to you and you have to write it down in shorthand. Then you have to transcribe it back to into longhand, and you're only allowed to make 5 whole mistakes, that includes getting one single letter wrong. It's tough. Unfortunately it's not one of those subjects that you can just learn in a matter of hours or days either, and as a result it's very time consuming. I have made the rookie mistake of not looking at it for the past four months, and now I'm frantically trying to catch up before I go to uni next week. So if I'm a little quite on the blogging front, you know why!

Have you ever learned shorthand, or would you want too?

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