Many thanks to Carlos for allowing me to join the group. I have been learning Anniversary for about a month, using the Functional Method books.
My reasons are twofold: first, for its intrinsic interest. As Louis Leslie writes in his introduction to the Functional Method, it is an “intensely fascinating study” — to a degree that has quite surprised me. This fascination has led me, in the past, to dabble in Chinese characters, which though they are perhaps at the opposite pole from Gregg in terms of efficiency, share the characteristic of being in a way a language unto themselves, quite apart from the substratum of Chinese, or as it may be, Japanese, and formerly other tongues in the same cultural sphere, such as Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul, the Korean script, shares with Gregg the characteristic of having been rationally devised to encapsulate the sounds of that language; in the past, it was written interspersed with sinograms, like Japanese.
There is also the practical motive of utility. I write a lot in longhand, and though its slowness is sometimes an advantage in giving time to formulate a sentence in the mind, it often just feels too slow to keep up with thought. Also, my handwriting is awful, and I hope to remedy this with Gregg! Some years ago I taught myself touch typing (using the ergonomically designed Dvorak layout, rather than Qwerty) and I wish I’d mustered the discipline to do so decades sooner: not only is it faster, it’s just more comfortable.
Despite spending half an hour or so almost daily, my progress has been slow; I think I did not take sufficiently to heart the advice to thoroughly master each section before moving on. But it felt to me that if I repeated the material too many times I might just end up learning it by heart. I was interested to discover from posts here that there is more practice material available that is graded according to the progression of the book.
I chose Anniversary because it is “hardcore”, though perhaps Simplified would have been a good place to start too.
One question at this point, would it be a bad thing to begin using what I already know, especially the short forms such as “that”, “that is”, “without”, “with the”, and so on, sprinkling them amongst my longhand?