week one review

Hello everyone!

Working on my New Years resolution to go back to studying shorthand #shorthand #greggshorthand #writing

A post shared by Abigail (@alien_sunset) on Jan 1, 2018 at 9:36am PST

So the end of last week and most of this week have been rather busy and stressful for me, so I made the executive decision to put off starting chapter two until Monday. This is OK, because it gives me a little more time to read and re-read the materials from chapter one.

I'm actually pretty impressed by how quickly it is all coming back to me! My biggest problem is that my penmanship isn't nearly as neat as it was, so I know I have to be extra careful not to get sloppy.

I hope you all are having a great week and i'll see you at the end of chapter two!

working my way back

Hello everyone!

Wow, it's been ages hasn't it? Sorry about that, I started having a bit of difficulty keeping all the forms in line, and then I realized that I was putting more energy into learning Esperanto than focusing on shorthand so I decided to take a break from the shorthand while I focused on Esperanto.

Well I finished the Duoling Esperanto tree in about 6 months, and then did a bunch of other stuff, but I just never got around to coming back to my shorthand, I just kept putting it off :(

But now the New Year is upon us and I'm ready to buckle down again! I've re-worked what materials I'm using and my methodologies a bit, and I've made up a new intensive 12 week course (see tab above) which I plan on following up to at least chapter 6, since most of that will be review. (Last time I stalled out around chapter 7) and then I'll probably move back into the slower one unit a week schedule until the end (see 48 week syllabus tab above)

I'm going to try and make at least one post a week talking about my progress, so I hope I'll see you around!

frustrated

key after the cut

still here

Hello, sorry about the big gap in posting there.  I've been bitten by the spring cleaning bug, And while I have been doing my studies, I haven't been putting as much effort into finding good quotes or things to post, and most of the things I did find had diphthongs or blends.

But I started Chapter 5 this week, which means I can do diphthongs now!



key below:

catching up

I'm lagging a bit behind this month.

The last part of last week and the beginning of this week were a bit crazy and I just didn't have the time/energy to study as I should. So the remainder of this week will be catching up with unit 9 and review will be pushed back to next week.

Here is something I wrote up last week but ran out of time to write it out neatly to scan and post:

Arrrrrr!

(And it isn't even Talk Like a PirateDay)

Image via Daily Gregg

(warning this post uses a bit of IPA)

I just finished up Unit 8, where we are introduced to the special "R" rules. Unit 8 is only concerned with the "ur/ir/er/ar" sound in relation to the beginning or ending of a straight stroke. For the rest of the Anniversary's method of expressing "R" I'll need to wait until Unit 20.

R is weird - In America, some people say it is a vowel, but that isn't quite right. R is a bully, specifically R doesn't like shwas (ə). To quote one of the phonics books that I used to teach my son to read: when R comes after an I, E or U it likes to squish it down so far that you can hardly hear it at all - all you can hear is "er"(ɚ) (note: "ar" is really "ɑ" plus "ɚ")

So in Anniversary Gregg, R colored shwas are expressed by reversing the circle.*

Like the graphic above states, this special method (reversing the circle) is unique to Anniversary, In simplified and later editions, they just write the R out. I don't have the simplified manual, so I don't know exactly how the rule is stated, and I'm not quite sure why they decided to change it. (Ok, I actually do have an idea: This special rule is one more thing to memorize, and [looking ahead to unit 20] it can probably be a bit difficult to write smoothly without a lot of drilling practice. And it may be a bit more difficult to read fluently.) But it is definitely something to keep in mind when reading old found shorthand notes, or when choosing a method to learn.

On a personal note I usually prefer the way the Anniversary reversed circle words look, but there are a handful of Simplified versions that I think look nicer.  Maybe once I'm all done with Anniversary I'll get a Simplified manual and I'll blend the two versions for a more pleasing to my eye hybrid.

*

There are exceptions when it would be impossible or really hard to write quickly, like "air"

And since Gregg isn't really a wholly phonetic system, sometimes the rules are bent a bit to to make other words that don't quite fit that description easier/quicker to write.

red apple

I started chapter 2 yesterday.
unit 4 adds "P" "B" "V" "F" "SH" "CH" & "J" and a bunch more brief forms to my vocabulary.

I feel kind of giddy, there are so many more things I can write now!
(although I will definitely need a lot more practice to get the new shapes down and memorize everything.)



key after the jump.
(As always, if you know Gregg and spot a mistake, please let me know.)

Week One / Unit One

 


I finished up unit one today.

I spent a lot of time trying to draw the forms properly, especially ar/al and ac/ag. I can read pretty well, but the shapes don't stick in my head when it comes to writing. I'm painfully slow at writing, and have trouble remembering the letters and proper way to attach letters and vowels. I think I'll have to pay better attention to writing and form shapes in coming weeks.

Despite all this I'm still enjoying myself, It's only been a week and I'm still making a lot of progress. I've known for a while that I'm better at learning to read than to 'spell' so I knew this would probably be a problem, and the best way to counter it is to copy more and practice, practice, practice! I'm taking pictures and keeping my notes to compare as I go along so I can see how much progress I'm making.