There are various books available on learning Pitman shorthand. Textbooks are available secondhand, or you can buy them new on Amazon.

Most of these books teach the Pitman language in a series of exercises. First you learn a group of consonants, and a few vowels (ape, pay), and some shortcuts (shall, the, you), then read and write sentences using the words and sounds learned so far ("You shall pay the ape").

The problem with this system is that takes a long time before you can do anything useful with it. You pretty much have to go through all the exercises before you have enough information to write any word you can think of.

I've always found that I learn a system better if I can start using it right away. For example, I learned to type by typing stories on an old typewriter. I was very slow at first, but I quickly got faster, and typing my own material was more motivating for me than typing exercises.

Learning this way is more difficult with in Pitman. The drills in the books train you from the start how to do things correctly, but learning this way means you can't do your own thing (eg, write a diary) until you've gone through the whole course, which will likely take you months. If you wanted to write about what you heard on the radio last night, you'd be stuck at the word radio, because it has an unusual double vowel (the "io" at the end) which most of the books don't teach you until page 220.

Why does it take so long to learn? It's because Pitman isn't just an alphabet. It uses a number of methods, or layers, to compress words into a short form. The compression works like this:

(1) Represent words as sounds. This eliminates the waste caused by double letters, silent letters, and the need to use two characters to represent one sound - as we do with "sh" or "th".

(2) Write those sounds as very simple characters, which require fewer pen strokes than traditional letters. In normal writing, an uppercase M requires four strokes. In Pitman, it's one stroke. That's a 75% saving.

(3) Find the most common combinations of sounds, and give them their own special simple characters. Pitman has symbols for common English combinations, such as "Pr" "Str" and "ing". It also uses other tricks to show sounds, like shortening strokes to show the presence of a final T or D, or making them longer to show a final "TR" sound.

(4) Abbreviate words by leaving out the vowels. This allows for very fast writing, when you want to get an idea down quickly. The vertical position of each word suggests what the first vowel is, which is usually enough to identify the word.

(5) Take the most common words, and represent them as symbols. In English, the 100 most common words make up roughly half of all printed material (in fact, the top 25 make up a third of it), so being able to write these words quickly makes a big difference to writing speed.

If you're like me, you'll be AMAZED at how far Pitman can compress a word, but learning all the techniques is slow, and takes a lot of mental effort. Look at this symbol on the right. A squiggle and two dots. It says "dreading". Not "dr/g" or some dumb abbreviation like that, but "dreading", clear as day. In fact, you can leave out the dot on the right if you want, reducing it to a squiggle and one dot, and it still says "dreading".

It hardly seems possible that a mark like this could encode so much information, but it does. Pitman does a fantastic job of compressing word-sounds. It's the MP3 of speech.

Want to know it works? The curved stick is a DR symbol. It's half the normal length for this symbol, which shows that the sound ends in a final D, and the dot on the right (as well as the position of the word on the line) shows the E in the middle. DR-E-D. The dot at the bottom is one of the shortcuts for -ing. So - "dreading". This is an example of how Pitman uses a complicated range of techniques to compress a word.

But there's no reason you have to learn it all at once. In fact, if you start with steps 1 and 2 - the basic sounds, what you might call "Pitman Longhand", you'll have a complete working system, much faster than regular writing and mysterious enough to impress people who are watching you write.

Using this "reduced instruction set", the word "dreading" combines the symbols D-R-E-D-I-NG. It looks like this. (The thick downstrokes are D's, the upper curve is an R, the lower curve is an NG, and the two dots represent E and I.) Not too difficult. A Pitman teacher would be appalled at the look of it, but as there aren't many Pitman teachers in the world today, the risk is not high. And the method isn't actually wrong - it's just long-winded.

I'd guess you could write at around 60 words a minute this way. Once you're comfortable with this quick and dirty base system, you can easily add the other "layers" afterwards (or not). Each layer will make your writing more efficient.

And this is pretty much the way the Pitman shorthand system developed in the first place. Many of the techniques evolved over time, as shorthand enthusiasts pushed the system to its limits, then found new ways to make it even faster.

If that sounds like a plan, we'll move on.

Next... How it works