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Cultural Note: A brief history of shorthand in Japan

Discussion in 'The Asylum' started by Keiichi-Morisato, Jan 25, 2015.

  1. Keiichi-Morisato DJ Double Cheezy ~ Sakura Animé Radio

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    ▼ I’ll always remember what my doctor told me: “Germs . Al die Mo 20 lybotomly aga 1.2 Al ent rc S.12w rojanlwww”

    [​IMG]

    Even with English’s relatively simple letters, shorthand was in big demand before the digital era in order to take down information quickly. It shouldn’t be a big leap to assume Japanese with multiple character sets and kanji would welcome a faster writing system. Thus several styles of Japanese shorthand were developed over the 20th century. Let’s take a look at a few.


    ■ Writing really fast
    Some people might confuse shorthand with simply writing very quickly and roughly like your doctor might do in stereotypically hard-to-read cursive on your prescription.

    Japanese has that as well, derived from the Chinese style of writing kanji characters fast. In essence it’s like cursive script in English but allows people to write more complex kanji quickly and in continuous strokes. Unfortunately it also often resembles the Ebola virus.

    [​IMG]

    You can still see it in places like restaurant signs and elements of it are still common in people’s hand writing. Much like how in English you’ll see some people merge cursive and block print, people in Japan might mingle carefully crafted kanji with something a little more scribbly.

    ▼ The Japanese word for “Stasi” (国家保安省) written both at a casual pace (top) and very quickly (bottom). “Stasi” was accidentally chosen at random in case you were wondering.

    [​IMG]

    Although this speed things up considerably, handwriting will generally get speeds of around 30 words per minute, which isn’t nearly enough to take casually dictated English at around 100 wpm. The situation in Japanese is similar with about 100 spoken wpm and 25 wpm in handwriting. These are very rough figures mind you, but they clearly indicate a huge gap.

    But with shorthand we can achieve this, and then some. Back in 1922 Nathan Behrin, the sternographer for the Supreme Court, managed to jot down speaking at a blazing 350 wpm. That’s about the speed of a professional policy debater. A little faster than these guys who are in training.



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    #1 Keiichi-Morisato, Jan 25, 2015
    Last edited: Jan 25, 2015

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