#typey type

dean: [30 bullet points of both deep and surface analysis]

cas: [same]

In the last couple of days, I’ve been trying out Typey type. For those who don’t know, it’s a website to practice steno (machine shorthand). So far, I haven’t managed to write faster than on qwerty, but I wanted to share what I like and don't like about it so far. I managed to steno 50 WPM some times, but they were rare enough that I’m not really counting those, but even if I did write 50 WPM on average, it’d just be the speed I type at on qwerty, so I’m still faster on qwerty than on steno. I seem to steno at about 30 WPM. It's basically a typing practice where you start with simple words, and then you get to write other words as you go to through the different lessons which deal with different rules, though the rules aren't explained in detail on the site itself, but there are other places where one can learn about them. You could of course also figure them out by intuition, since the site does show how to write each word the first time you run into it as long as it's in the "discover" mode. And it shouldn't show new words in the other modes (it's possible to get them by changing lessons while in practice mode though).

Screenshot of the results of a drill: it says finished and shows a speed of 29 WPM and an accuracy of 83.9 percent. Below it says "faster than hunt and peck typists and has buttons for taking another lesson or restarting the current one. In the right side, partially cut text shows words I misstroked: one such word is readable: I wrote "stops" instead of "tops".

In case you're wondering, you do have to correct mistakes when you make them, but they may appear on the list of misstrokes anyway.

Here are some things I like about the site:

It teaches rules almost one by one, and at the end it has some texts to practice.

It tells me what I'm faster than (faster than handwriting, than Morse code, and so on) so I want to get faster and see what you get compared to next.

It tells me what I did wrong (though sometimes I make mistakes it doesn't detect, or see a mistake in one word as being in the next word).

It let's me use my own briefs (if I want to write "you can" as WH-BG, I can do so, and it's counted as correct as long as I have it in my dictionary).

It can give me hints, which almost always work.

I get statistics so I can see which words I've bes practiced more.

And here are some things I didn't like that much:

If I get some extra letters at the end of a word, it thinks those letters are a mistake in the next word. Also, once I've written a word correctly it won't let me delete that word, which can get in the way of multi-word briefs.

It doesn't happen often, but you can get word boundary issues in drills, as it picks random words and there is a chance it'll give you a pair like "pick nick" (I don't think I got that one, but I did get something along those lines, and Plover thought I was writing a two-syllable word.

The text field isn't automatically focused, so I have to click on it every time I want to start a drill or practice or anything. Even when I've just pressed "restart lesson, it still has me click in the text field before I can actually start writing.

Its hints seem to be for a specific version of Plover, which has one strokes for "sur" and "corp" mapped to what my version uses for "Sur" and "Corp.", so in order to avoid issues with capitalization I had to add some entries to my personal dictionary. I could probably just have written those words letter-by-letter.