Stenography journey, entry 4

[estirose]

So I've had my keyboard for about two days. Still putting stickers together for the various key mappings that are unique to the Polyglot (I'm leaving off any letter keys for QWERTY and the steno layout). I had to shrink the key areas somewhat as it proved that the tops of the keys are smaller than I thought! I'm still printing on regular paper for the moment to make sure I'm happy (because the sticker paper wasn't cheap) but I think I'll be able to stick stickers on keycaps this weekend. Since they're mostly there to help me memorize where these keys are, they don't have to last forever either.

For learning things, I'm using a combo of the online copy of the book "Learn Plover", Steno Jig (mostly for learning the key layout, though you can also try the Learn Plover exercises) and TypeyType (stenography exercises).

So far... well, I'm averaging around 4-5 wpm with an accuracy of 50-80% on the really easy words. I'm talking consonant-vowel-consonant with a couple of variations of consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant. No complex words, nothing really fancy, just the very basic of basics just past knowing where my fingers go.

Right now my difficulty seems to be any words with "e" or "u" in them (due to the way stenotype keyboards work, you don't learn "I" at first, but I don't seem to have any problems with "a" and "o" words). I'm still also pressing the wrong vowel sound a lot. But when I do manage the right keypresses... it's just so magical. (I also have to remind myself that I've been learning this for a week at most so I'm actually doing pretty well!)

Having the steno keyboard definitely puts me in a different mindset so I'm glad I got it. The rest should come in time.