L and R

This pair forms the top of the circle. There's an easy way to remember which is which. L is Left and R is right. Both are written from left to right, meaning that L is written in an upwards direction. (Most Pitman strokes are written downwards.)

If you have clawlike appendages, you can use them to remember which is which.

If you lack clawlike appendages, it is possible to use your forefingers.

You can also imagine that L looks like a lowercase L which is being blown in a strong wInd.

What's the story here? WHY is L being blown in a strong wind? IS the puffy thing in fact a wind, or is it some kind of gaseous creature, and if so, what does it have against lowercase L's? I'm sorry, I don't know the answers to these questions.

F and SH

Why do we only see the bottom of the fish? Again, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's flirting.

M and N

M is an easy one to remember because it closely resembles an M... if you squint, and imagine a centre line, and imagine that it doesn't resemble an N even more closely. Or you can remember that M looks like a Molehill. Or you can just imagine a Mean face. M for mean, malicious, malevolent and miserable. And N looks like a Nice Smile. N for nice.

Thirty seconds after this drawing was made, M killed M.

Th and S

The left and right segments look like parentheses "( )". That's one way to remember them. paren-TH-Ses. The first one is Th, the second one is S.

T and C

Think of a lighthouse - a Tower by the sea. The upright line is T for tower. The horizontal line is the C... I mean sea. C'mon, together we can make this work.

J

I don't have a good mnemonic for Ch, but J looks a bit like a J, if you add a dot and a curve. Or better yet, if you just replace it with a J.

By a similar stretch of the imagination, W could be the end of a W. A "singleyou", rather than a "doubleyou". Or possibly a Walking stick.

As for Y, it's practically IDENTICAL to a lowercase Y, with just a couple of its identifying features reversed or removed. .

And H is just a few evolutionary steps removed from an ordinary lowercase H.

Once you see it, it's so obvious!

No, the truth is that the Pitman strokes are pretty nonintuitive, and it takes a while to learn them, no matter how many hoops you jump through to make them look like regular letters.

But if you think my mnemonics are bad, check out this handy guide from Phonetic Shorthand : A Complete Manual of Pitman's Phonography With All The Modern Improvements, written by William W. Osgoodby in 1894. Don't follow it too closely, though - if you look carefully, you'll see that some symbols, like Y and W, have changed since 1894.