I’m starting a Gregg-learning club with some friends, as a productive quarantine/summer pastime, that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
In the past, I have tried teaching myself Anniversary, and even made a little bit of progress, but I’m hoping that with this accountability, I’ll be able to finally finish the thing. Right now though, I am puzzling over which series to use, with the choice being between Anniversary and Simplified. I have both of the manuals in physical form, and I’ve been working through the simplified manual to see what I can see about it. Here are the pros and cons I have noted thus far:
Anniversary:
- Pros:
- Incredibly well documented, with a multitude of freely-accessible pdfs and other resources that include extra reading material, drills, and dictionaries. This makes it very conducive to online group learning, which is my goal.
- Old, classic, and beautiful.
- Ever so slightly faster (for what are, to me, mysterious reasons–hence this post)
- Cons:
- Very… technically written manuals. The Anniversary Series simply throws all of the symbols at you by category at once, which I find to be a little bit challenging for beginners. Sometimes the language in the manual can be a bit abstract or vague.
Simplified:
- Pros:
- Very, very well-explained in the manual. Each character is introduced one at a time in some semblance of order of frequency. The explanations are down-to-earth and it just feels easier to learn it this way.
- Published like new, and available on Amazon for 15 bucks. My copy is absolutely beautiful.
- Cons:
- Very, very limited outside resources. I have found virtually none besides the manual itself, which means I’m at a loss for extra drills, reading resources and everything else.
- Ever so slightly slower (for reasons unknown…)
I read the discussions about the general differences between the various series of Gregg, but I’m hoping for a little more detail and specifics about the kinds of differences between Simplified and its predecessor.
I’m planning on using Anniversary, because I feel we might as well go big or go home, and the easily accessible resources are eminently helpful for learning online and in a group. But I’m wondering if it would be worth using the Simplified manual to learn the basics–the alphabet, the rules for joining characters and whatever else. I’m just not sure how far we’d be able to go straddling them both, and if the differences start right off the bat, or if they don’t appear in earnest till later on.
Regardless of that, can anyone give a quick summary of the technical differences, and what I would hypothetically be learning new or changing if I had started with Anniversary and switched to Simplified?
Thank you!
As an update, we eventually landed on Simplified. We feel that for our purposes as mostly high-schoolers, the return on investment will be highest with Simplified. Also, if we ever feel the need for speed, we can certainly transition to Anniversary (something I am definitely considering for the future).
Thank you everyone for the input!