Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

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For anyone interested in optimising this further, orthographic (letter-based) cursive shorthand systems are the answer. I personally only know part of the Melin system[1], but there are variants designed for English as the primary language too. (Melin is of course perfectly usable with English also.)

The flow of a cursive shorthand system is unmatched by anything else. I highly recommend learning enougnh to experience it.

(The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words. But normal English spelling is so complicated that tradeoff can be worth it for heavy usage. Orthographic systems often also contain phonetic components, but they tend to be optional extensions that improve efficiency, rather than required like with purely phonetic systems.)

[1]: http://melinsstenografi.nu/image/sti-ukast.png

What a rabbithole ;) TIL about "Stiefography". I wonder how useful this is. I remember math lectures - typically, our prof used the white^H^H^H^H^Hchalkboard, so I could just write down things fast enough.

There is evidence that typing is actively bad for memory rentention compared to writing things down with a pen. I wonder where Stenography falls in this continuum.

Depends on how it is used! Recording speech nearly verbatim is bad for retention; summarising in own words along the way is good for retention.

Longhand forces summarisation, but it's still possible with shorthand.

I guess the whole point of shorthand is to capture verbatim (at least official stenography in the german Bundestag/rat). I'm not sure if stenographers have enough thought capacity to summarize and write at the same time. That's kindof the question I'm asking myself.

As an aside, can simultaneous translators do summarization ? Or is it trained out of them ?

> The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words.

The point of the phonetic systems is that you don't have to ‘spell’ words at all: what you say is what you write.

(Then there are briefs, of course, but those are for additional benefit.)

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