Two weeks ago, I broke the rules of learning Teeline shorthand and learned it not in six weeks, but three days. Not sure what Teeline is? Click here for the last blog.
If you are here for 1000 common words in Teeline, skip to the bottom – I have shared my notes and an empty template for practice at the bottom for free.
If you are a recruiter doubting my claims that ‘I never stop learning, and can learn anything’ – this is the kind of thing I do with my weekends…
As with any new ability, the skill ceiling doesn’t stop. To say I learned it completely is not the whole story. I learned Teeline to a functional level in three days, and have been using it since. Teeline is however designed for speed – 120 to 150 words per minute ideally.
I spent last weekend therefore coming up with my system to speed up.
Designing a speed-learning strategy for Teeline
There were a few things to consider.
What makes Teeline faster to write than normal longhand English? What do I need to focus on to get the most value out of my practice? How do I systematise the process to make it efficient, effective, and reviewable?
What makes Teeline so fast?
Teeline is so fast on three counts. Firstly, those squiggly lines are all abbreviated versions of the English alphabet. If you were to write Teeline outlines in full, they would likely be faster to write than the original longhand word.
You do not however write the words in full. Most vowels are emitted, leaving you with a consonant shell – effectively an abjad, in linguistic terms. This cuts right down the amount you need to write to form whole words.
Finally, these outlines get abbreviated through ‘blends’. When certain groupings occur, letter shapes can merge to make them even quicker to write. Common words groupings also become merged.
I decided that for my speed-learning method to effectively increase my Teeline speed, it would need to cover these blends and abbreviations significantly enough to retain the blend rules in long-term memory. So a learning strategy formed from those assumptions.
Why 1000 words?
The basic strategy I decided on was to practice the 1000 most common words in the English language, as written in Teeline. This might seem a lot, but there is method here.
I’m a language guy. My first degree was in German and Chinese. For the latter, it was really useful to come up with efficient methods for building up vocabulary, because there are thousands of unique characters in the Chinese writing system.
The need for hyper-efficiency in Chinese led me to start heavily using frequency lists when starting new languages. A frequency list presents the lexis of a language and ranks them by how often they appear in a massive corpus of text. Although each corpus has its own biases (many frequency lists end up with highly journalistic language) I’ve used them now for Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Hindi and Welsh to quickly build up a base vocabulary.
When it came to building a useful Teeline reference I thought of frequency lists. Why not use an English frequency list and treat Teeline the same way I treat a new language?
There are many contending frequency lists online, and generally I would trust those from an academic source most. The downside is they are often not publicly available (got one for Welsh by asking Cardiff University) and are more technical, designed for linguistic research. The upside is they tend to be more accurate.
I didn’t need to know with complete certainty for Teeline whether my list was actually the 1000 most common words (there are some on the list I doubt would make the cut), but needed rather generally very common words that would cover most of the alphabet and most of the word groupings possible in the English Language.
I settled for English First’s (EF) ‘1000 most common English words‘ as a good middle ground between very accessible and likely reasonably reliable. This gave me the basis for building my 1000 word Teeline resource.
Systematising Teeline speed-learning
So I had a plan and 1000 words to turn into Teeline. I now needed the list of words converted to Teeline and turned into a reviewable document.
I decided on turning my 1000 word list into a table. In one column I had my words, and to the right of each column an empty space with a dash running through it. Teeline outlines need to be on a line, as the meaning of outlines change depending whether they are above or below the line – my table therefore needed a midline on each cell.
The original hope was to find a reference online that already had thousands of words written out in Teeline. A few resources are out there, but only cover a handful of words – not useful enough.
Instead, I got hold of a second hand copy of ‘Teeline Gold word list‘, a reference of 12,000 Teeline outlines, and went manual. I printed off my table, and spent the rest of the weekend filling in my 1000 words in good old fashioned ink.
If you want to throw 40 quid at a reference book, go ahead, but I’ll take the 3 quid version if it only means the occasional coffee stain.
In retrospect being forced to manually write out the outlines was actually better news. I got to practice writing most outlines I will use regularly, while really thinking actively about why the outlines are as they are. Yes, it took around 8 hours to write in all my outlines and think about each one in turn. That was however 8 hours well spent, and it has cleared up many of the mistakes I was making after my weekend dash to learn Teeline in May.
For all that work, I now have my own reference point for the most common words I will need for writing Teeline, which I now share below – all the notes, scribbles and corrections left in. An empty template is also available at the bottom of this blog, in case you feel inspired to give this a go!
what next?
Learning doesn’t stop and skills can always be improved. Building this reference tool has already significantly sped up my Teeline writing, but a key reason for building it was to have a reviewable tool to really solidify blending and abbreviation rules in my head.
The next step therefore is to do what I do for my early stage language learning – stick the outlines into Anki, an open source flashcard app. Once all inputted, for a few weeks I can have a series of words pop up on my screen, notebook in hand to jot down the outline. If correct, that outline won’t appear for a while. If wrong, I’ll see it again tomorrow. That way, in a few weeks time I won’t need to think at all to write most Teeline words – and a process of reaching high speeds in Teeline that usually takes half a year would have taken a month.
Empty template for practice
Seeing as there seem to be only limited reference resources for Teeline available online, I thought I would share mine for free here. They are imperfect, but were hugely useful for me. Feel free to take my filled in version above, in all its imperfection and with my very own scraggly notes in the margins, but if you want to have a go at practicing 1000 words yourself, the empty version is below.