In the end, steno itself is probably not a lot harder to learn than QWERTY (although I think more frustrating because the "hunt and peck" option for steno is less intuitive and often slower). But it requires sort of a "supporting ecosystem" of skills and tools that is more complex and not amenable to use cases other than natural language. That makes it much less attractive for general use.
I had thought that chording to produce a words was enough to qualify as steno.
Happy to be corrected :)
100% agree, also it may be harder because in the US we still don't teach kids how to fucking read correctly. It's still common to have elementary school curricula that do not teach how letters are related to phonemes _at all_.
When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with those labels, and hit them in sequence.
To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once, knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for 'prepared'.
You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/
Obviously if you're gonna use it as you daily driver, you'd want to get a NKRO keyboard, but the "hold one key and tap the rest" trick works for the web demo.
QWERTY is more 'what you see is what you get' - you push a key and you get that letter. Sure the layout is weird and learning to type takes some effort, but there's very little additional cognitive load. It's like a WYSIWYG editor.
Steno is like Vim, you have to have all of the phrases in your head tracking a lookup table cognitively. Over time sure that becomes muscle memory and lowers the load but I think it's less gradual. You have to frontload a lot of the commands first. IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain niche.
like vim.. winces in anticipation of things thrown at him
I tried to learn in, but I always fall back to my old habits since my right hand hurt otherwise. I don't think I will ever bother getting fast. It is probably way better to learn it properly from the beginning.
What worked for me was switching to dvorak. With no keycaps to match the layout, I had no option but to memorize it (initially with the help of a cheatsheet on screen). Conveniently, back then, I had no idea how to revert back to qwerty without restarting X after using xmodmap to switch layout, and I'm the type to not restart my session (or computer) except for updates every few months or so.
It also helps a lot doing this "at home" when you've nothing particularly important to do on the computer (running a basic touch typing tutor program for an hour or two and again later in the evening while just chatting away on IRC or such during the day is great because you're typing but have no real pressure). Not during work. It sucks struggling to get things done, and you're very likely to switch back to the old method and that'll just stall progress.
After one day, I had more or less memorized the layout but of course typing was still slow and somewhat frustrating. After a few days, it stopped feeling frustrating but was still a little slow. In a week or two I had reached or surpassed my original qwerty speed. I never used qwerty during that period, it was learn or bust.
I dunno. I don't have anywhere near 60 words per minute that are actually worth recording.
Ergonomic typing however, I guess is important. And I am bad at that. Looking down to find the keys might be a bad habit? I have almost trained that away.
News to me
...and from my understanding WhatsApp is very common in Europe, which can also be used from the web.
I don't really understand why properly trained typing is more ergonomic, anyway. If I keep my hands perfectly on the homerow, each letter is nearly the same exact motion. The way I type normally, my hands move around a bit, so there's a couple character history built into my motions. This seems to me like it ought to reduce the repetitive motions, which are what lead to repetitive strain injuries, right?
Maybe I stress my hands more while tryhard practicing touch typing than I would in normal use though.
Forcing myself to stop looking at the keys initially increased error rate to an unacceptable/demotivating level, but in a couple of weeks I was touch typing quite a bit faster than I could hunt and peck with no loss in accuracy.
Lesson one was learning A-S-D-F J-K-L-; and typing words and combinations on the home row, then we'd learn a few new letters each day. After that we had to learn how to use the tab function, address envelopes, and common forms for business letters. We were tested with "eyes on copy" typewriting where we didn't look at our hands.
(Other obsolete skills I learned in "Jr. High School" include how to set letterpress type, and Morse Code. I still use Morse Code today on amateur radio.)
Then a few years later as teenagers do in high school I choose typing class since all my friends did. So I learned more typing unusual for a guy at that time mid 1980s.
Then IRC when I got onto the Internet in the early 1990s. You had to type very fast to get in a jab or a joke before someone else did.
Now I'm in IT and typing is ubiquitous.
Initial learning curve is practically non-existent - Anybody can type a letter "A" or a word or a sentence on a QWERTY by looking and poking. It is not my understanding that I could do ANYthing on a stenography device without significant, serious training.
just to make the pedantic point, learning curves show skill improvement plotted against time spent/experience, and therefore a steep learning curve means you learn quickly. A shallow learning curve is the difficult one. /pedantry
It's not wrong to say "steep learning curve" if you mean it's easy
I self labelled as pedantic and pointed to an explanation, that does not make me a prescriptivist, it makes me didactic.
I’m not relying on the Wikipedia article to support my claims. I’m relying on my native English language usage. I have literally never heard anyone in my life use the phrase “steep learning curve” in the way you use it. Not even once. However, I could have heard it in an ambiguous context and assumed that the speaker or writer intended to use it in the way that you do. I’ll admit, in that case, that I may have heard it used the same way you do, and assumed that they mean to use it in the way I do.
I am not making personal attacks here, so I hope I didn’t offend, not to suggest that your disagreement implies offense. If I did, I sincerely apologize.
I wonder if this is a case of certain phrases just being imprecise or ambiguous enough to be difficult to use in conversation or writing.
For example, suppose I applied some wax to a polished wood floor, way more than I thought I did or meant to apply originally.
Suddenly, you walk in from the next room or down the hall. I stop you before you slip and fall on the excess wax, saying, “Wait, I spilled a deceptively [small | large] amount of wax on the floor, and I haven’t cleaned it up yet.”
You stop in time, and don’t slip. I clean up the wax, and all is well.
If all you have is my single sentence to go on, whether I had said that I spilled a deceptively large or deceptively small amount of wax on the floor, and no additional context to know that I spilled too much wax on the floor, you might deduce from context that there must be too much wax, thus leading to a slipping hazard.
Now we’re having coffee later and I’m telling you about my vacation, and all the new flora and fauna I saw. I tell you about seeing a rare and elusive jabberwocky, and I told you it was deceptively [small | large]. Without further elaboration or context, you may struggle to deduce whether I mean that the jabberwocky is smaller or larger than expected or than it appeared, or both, or simply that it was smaller or larger than expected for jabberwockies, given just that single sentence.
Does that make sense? I used jabberwockies because they are literary creatures that do not exist in real life. You can replace them in the example with anything which you, the hypothetical listener or reader, is unfamiliar with enough to not know how small or large they are in relation to other referent in my vacation story, or anything else I was comparing it with in that context.
It appears that we can both be right, depending on usage and context. You may not agree, and seem not to; I find my usage appropriate for the contexts I use it in, and clarify with supporting statements in context so as to not confuse others, because I know that this phrase is used in both ways colloquially and mathematically.
To the degree that you insist that the phrase “steep learning curve” only has the one meaning you describe and use, I call your insistence prescriptivist. If you deny that others use the phrase correctly when they use it in ways that make sense, given the knowledge of how other people use it in ways that differ to your own, I would call that denial pedantic, and not didactic, but instead quirky, but otherwise okay, as long as we both understand what we each mean, and otherwise understand each other’s meaning and context.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/what-is-mea...
I had no idea this was even ambiguous before your comment.
I've hitherto only considered the possibility that "deceptively large" means "large, but appeared otherwise. Having now googled this, it seems there's some debate about it, and while I can see both arguments, I think this is down to incorrect usage muddying the water.
In "A is deceptively B", "deceptively" is an adverb, so adding extra definition to the manner in which "A is B". Short of ignoring grammar rules entirely, I can't see a good case for arguing the opposite, even though it seems that examples exist where the sentence only makes logical sense by interpreting it as a negative.
> An activity that it is easy to learn the basics of, but difficulty to gain proficiency in, may be described as having "a steep learning curve".
That matches QWERTY exactly.
yes, a curve can change its slope from "learn the basics of" vs "gain more proficiency" and any place where it's not steep indicates difficulty.
that some things might have easy basics and other things might not have easy basics isn't really material, but where it matters, picking up the basics would be steep if it is easy.
I learned touch typing within a week on holiday vacation with a software similar to this website: https://www.typingstudy.com/ (Young me felt very proud of being able to type like dad.) Once you have invested the time to learn the basic movements, you will become accustomed to them naturally.
It makes it way easier to communicate via text.
Best class I took because of touch typing.
On the other hand, I have plenty of peers that type nearly as quickly using two fingers or simply by doing years of using a computer. People learn the layout with use. It is easy enough that switching from a standard American keyboard to a Norwegian keyboard (whose alphabet has 3 more letters in addition to some other European language letters and punctuation) was a non-issue.
FYI I didn't switch off of Dvorak because I was bored of it, I'd traded my left hand pain for right hand pain, and I decided it was a bit worse. Workman is more evenly split between hands where both qwerty and Dvorak had a major bias.
Workman also seems to beat Dvorak and Colemak in efficiency, but if that were my main concern, I also considered qgmlwb and Halmak, which IIRC are even better.
This assertion ignores crucial differences in the basic mechanics of typing in a standard QWERTY keyboard (i.e., look at the keyboard, press one key, get the desired character) and using a stenograph/chorded keyboard. A standard keyboard's discoverability makes it incomparably easier to ramp up than guessing which key combos get you a specific character combo/word.
Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a majority of the time when typing you alternate between sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.
I was worried about it with Workman because it was slightly less logical. h still left of l, but quite far away, j and k are placed so that it's like you've inverted your camera controls in a game. Very easy to adjust anyway and I don't really think about it now. Your point about w and b is very good as well. Advanced vim users are actually less likely to use hjkl much due to having faster ways to get around in most cases.
Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.
Forgetting to configure computers after finishing with them, not knowing what layout was in use in the login screen, initial configuration, etc all cost time. I also use RDP a lot which is layout roulette (sometimes it changes, sometimes it doesn’t)