Hello,
I don’t know if Christine, Carlos and maybe others too, will be interested, but I thought of opening a thread dedicated to dictation practice (as opposed to slow, penmanship practice) where we could post our texts as written under dictation conditions and provide feedback and advice to one another.
I’m starting with this transcription of the first 1-and-a-half minute of a short documentary clip about the coronavirus. I slowed it down to 25% speed, and even then I had to cheat sometimes and rewind because I was lagging too far behind the speaker.
I had trouble mainly with the proper names (I’ve already seen that my ld blend went out the window in Donald), but also probably with some brief forms (I kept wondering if there wasn’t a brief form for such and such word as I was writing it), should this be a right-s or a left-s, etc. Sorry about the proportions, I wrote as fast as I could, i.e. still slowly but not as much as when I try to write properly. Please let me know if you can spot any mistake.
Here is the transcript: “Le laboratoire de virologie à Wuhan, soupçonné par plusieurs médias américains d’être à l’origine de l’épidémie de coronavirus… Selon le Washington Post, l’ambassade des États-Unis à Pékin a alerté à deux reprises le Département d’État américain sur des mesures de sécurité insuffisantes dans cet institut. Un labo qui étudie le coronavirus chez les chauves-souris. Les États-Unis enquêtent. “Nous savons qu’il y a ce laboratoire qui est à Wuhan. Nous savons que ce virus est originaire de Wuhan. Il y a encore beaucoup à apprendre. C’est ce que le président a dit. Nous devons en savoir plus. Ce virus est encore partout. Il s’agit de faire repartir l’économie dans le monde. Nous avons besoin de réponses et de transparence.” Face à cette accusation, riposte immédiate de Pékin : “Notre position est très claire : il s’agit d’une question scientifique et c’est le rôle des experts scientifiques et médicaux d’étudier cette question. Je voudrais vous rappeler que les reponsables de l’OMS ont déclaré à plusieurs reprises qu’il n’y a aucune preuve que le nouveau coronavirus ait été produit en laboratoire.” Une réponse qui risque bien de ne pas satisfaire Donald Trump, car le président américain accuse l’organisation mondiale de la santé d’être sous influence chinoise.
I’ve already noted:
-soupçonner, the "son" should be s-n
-média : I should simply have dotted the a
-département : short form, -part- written pt
-américain : short form a-m-n
-encore : I missed the ank blend twice
-sécurité : I missed the -rité suffix
-partout : p-t
-économie : forgot that o isn’t needed since it’s -co-
-réponse : short form r-e-p
-scientifique : no need for i in "if"
-plusieurs : my short form is wrong
-reprise : "re"
-satisfaire : the final f was too much
-organisation : my short form was wrong.
If you can spot anything else, please let me know. I’d be glad to (try) and do the same for you.
Thanks!
Hello Aymeric,
it’s a interesting idea to discuss about speed and French Gregg…
Alas, I can’t help you with your practice because the brief forms in Sénécal and DJS French are not the same.
For example, ‘partout’ is ‘p-a-t’ and ‘département’ is ‘d-p-t-m’ although ‘américain’ is also ‘a-m-n’…
Your brief form for ‘organisation’ looks good to me.
Funny… you wrote ‘plusieurs’ twice but differently which is… odd. 🙂
Once I took notes in shorhand at a lecture a while ago… for the fun. It wasn’t very important. But I found difficult to listen to what the woman said, summarize it and wondering how to write the unusual forms.
I think that wanting to write quickly is a bit premature if you don’t have all the words ready in your mind, ready to be written… which takes a lot of time…
But sometimes I can’t help writing what people says on TV… 🙂
What would really interest me is an update of the Sénécal: my version is a lot older than yours and I find very convenient all the prefixs and suffixs. For example, wouldn’t it be nice to have the prefix ‘hydro-‘ to make ‘hydrogène’, ‘hydrophyle’, ‘hydravion’, ‘hydrodynamique’…? There are niceties that would help for the legibility and the speed…
Shorthand is a matter of convention. We are not so many to use French Gregg: I think we could agree on new rules.
🙂
I found the best was a bit of both, at least up to 60. Slow was good for penmanship and confidence. Fast was good for seeing which outlines needed work and forcing myself to think in words and phrases, not letters. When I set my target too high, I got frustrated.
My Teeline book and CD I have starts does 40-50-60 for each passage in the theory, then starts speed building.
Swem's Systematic Speed Course starts at about 80, after you know all the theory. Each session includes a mix of theory review and different speeds.
https://gregg-shorthand.com/2010/01/24/systematic-speed-course-for-advanced/
https://cricketb.wordpress.com/2020/02/12/systematic-speed-course-for-advanced-writers-swem/
Thank you Christine for your feedback. Actually partout and département are written in DJS as they are written in Sénécal, it’s just me not writing them correctly 🙂
I agree it is way too premature for me to try and speed up. All I wanted initially was to get dictation… but even the slowest available speed on Youtube forced me to rush and end up with sloppy outlines. Yet I am convinced that now that I know the theory but lack the practice to apply the theory effortlessly, taking dictations is much more effective than just copying the business letters from my manual because:
1/The lexicon used in those letters looks nothing like the actual lexicon I intend to use shorthand with
2/when copying from the textbook, I never ask myself how to write such and such outlines, because I have to read every sentence in full before I can copy it, and I can still see the outline in my mind’s eye when its my turn to write it.
That’s why I think dictation is much more efficient: sometimes I stall on an outline I’m confused about, and getting stuck like that is the best way to memorize the correct form once you know what it is. All that’s needed is slow enough material, but it’s really hard to come by…
Oh and I fully agree with your proposal for a little affix revamp. I can also think of -gramme which is very outdated (apart from programme, all the other words such as télégramme, câblogramme, radiogramme, monogramme are really going extinct) so maybe the separated g letter could still be used, but for a more productive suffix? Not sure which one though.
Before you do the evening news, you need to practice dictation with very easy material, starting at 40 wpm (which in French is about 30 wpm) for not more than 1 minute, because if not you'll get frustrated. Take your book, find a passage, and do the dictation with the book open to start. A standard word in French is 1.8 syllable long, so count 54 syllables in your passage, and dictate that in 1 minute (that makes 30 standard words to be dictated in that minute, 30 wpm). If you think it's too easy, go up 72 syllables in 1 minute (40 wpm). Keep going until you find a speed that you can maintain but at the same time that it is not too easy. That would become your base speed. Then you can increase the length of the passage to 3 and even 5 minutes if you can. Again, all of this is done with very easy familiar material. However, you can take a newspaper and write shorthand for vocabulary practice (not for dictation), or do the evening news for vocabulary practice — but not for speed or for dictation at this stage.
Incidentally, for the passage above, I counted 408 syllables, which means 408/1.8 = 227 standard words in 1.5 min, or 151 wpm, but since you slowed down the speed to 25%, that would mean 151/4 = 38 wpm. So you wrote at a speed of approximately 38 wpm for 6 minutes more or less.
On this page, you can find audio files that begin at 40 wpm.
How would you write 'méditerrannéenne' by the way?
🙂
In my own writing, I would write it as #1, although #2 can be used if you want to be even more clear and spell more out of the word. I would use the same form for the masculine and the feminine (no need to distinguish because by context you would know).
Thanks, Carlos. 🙂
My comment was a 'petite pique' to Aymeric because 'méditerranéenne' is such a long word and it's present in one of the audio files in which I sent the link.
It's also a frustration because 'Atlantique' and 'Pacifique' were mentioned in my ressources but not 'Méditerranée'. I was born in a city on the Mediterranean coast so the word is very common to me.
For me, just saying 'la mer Med' is enough to identify it, so 'méditerranéennne' could be just 'me-d/n'. But I suppose it wouldn't work for everyone…
I wonder if you write your texts in Anniversary with new brief forms to guess, to remain in the spirit of the version. 🙂
Oh no, I spoiled the quiz for Aymeric!
Sometimes I'm way too quick to answer.
For the selections that I write for the blog, I don't improvise new forms because I want to make the writing legible; however, I connect words in phrases as much as possible. My own writing is another story though …
Never mind for the spoiler. 🙂
For those who are interested by speed and learning, it is interesting to read the 'Zen and the Art of Radiotelegraphy' by Carlo Consoli.
Right, it's not shorthand per se but the theory part about learning curve and building reflexes and automatic responses is very interesting.
And shorthand was used to note CW messages before… 🙂
Thank you Carlos for your explanations about how to measure dictation speed in French.
Thanks Christine for the link to recorded material. I tried the first one on "la vigilance", and it’s way too hard for me. I got confused about how to write several outlines and missed missed a few chunks of the text. The vocabulary is very different from what I get in my business letters… But it’s great practice!
Hello,
it seems that the best way to handle these things is to listen to the text first, note the vocabulary that will cause problem and practise these words first.
And then, after, you can transcribe easily the whole text.
There are many, many words you don't know immediately the corresponding form and cannot think about them while listening to the speaker.
The 'business letters'… it is almost always the same thing.
Yours truly… 🙂