I basically just PR'd the book and started in on the lessons. My purpose was to make my own way of writing that only I could understand. That's more leverage than just "I want to learn shorthand." I also combined it with easy "EasyScript" - which is basically useless if you don't transcribe your notes into longhand soon- but that's another story.
There are 2 ways to learn shorthand- the old school way or MY way, hehe. I just learned the sounds and pen movements for them. The "right" way is to go thru the most commonly used sounds first and commonly used phrases like "I have" "we are" and things like that and they have special symbols for "an/a" "have" and all sorts of things for short phrases that look EXACTLY like what you would use for another sound. It's the most confusing thing I've ever seen. For instance, the symbol for the words "are, our and hour" are similar to the symbol for the sound R. So on a sheet of paper I wrote the whole alphabet of sounds and next to them EVERY short word or phrase similar to it. It's not a mind map but it's structured alot better than the book. I only learned it 50% the "right" way and 50% what I made up as I went. My "easyshorthand" is just broken english and everything makes alot more sense to me but no one else would ever be able to figure out what I wrote.
With Spanish I'm just doing one lesson a night before going to bed. I'm taking alot more time with it and am not changing anything because I (obviously) want to learn it right. But by PRing the book for some reason everything feels like I've seen it before and I'm able to pick up on it pretty fast. The ONLY reason I'm learning it is because the guy who I'm learning martial arts from is using language analogies all the time. He teaches fighting as if it were a language. Typical self defense is just the "tourist" level of language - "where is the bathroom" "where can I exchange my money" etc- like if someone grabs your neck they teach you 15 responses to it and that's it, everything's broken up. But fighting is a conversation and there's unlimited levels. That's a long story though.
