Stenography Practice Tools
Here is a list of tools that are specifically designed for use with stenography learning in mind.
- Typey Type for Stenographers Type Type for Stenographers is a drilling and learning resource with a fair amount of practice material and detailed quantitative feedback. It includes lessons that follow the Learn Plover! book and lets you upload your own practice material. It also has dictionaries, flashcards, recommendations on how much of which lesson to do next, a break timer, a lookup tool, and a diagram generator. Beginners may want to reduce the word count and/or repetitions in the settings to make the lessons a more reasonable length. (Doing 45×3 words at 5 WPM takes 27 minutes!)
- Steno Jig Steno Jig has a wide variety of words, sentences, etc that you can practice with optional stroke suggestions. There are several beginner drills, and a large set of vocabulary words, and sentence practice drills that you can work through to gradually learn the top 8,000 most used words. It has Learn Plover! drills with stroke hints and lookahead display.
- Steno Grade Steno Grade is a fork of Steno Jig that aims to improve interface and add functionality. It has a built in spectra integration within its hint system and more configurable grading options. The page is in early beta but stay tuned to see updates.
- Practice Plover Practice Plover is a newer tool and still under construction. It has a whole set of interactive beginner exercises, many with audio, taking you most of the way through the material covered by Learn Plover.
- Qwerty Steno Qwerty Steno is a fantastic resource which has a tutorial on steno theory written by Mike Neale of the Open Steno community. It is made for use with a qwerty keyboard, without needing to download or enable Plover.
- The Steno Grind The Steno Grind provides interactive drills for any combination of exercises from The Art of Chording.
- Plover Dojo (unavailable) A lovely visual approach to learning the keyboard and basic chords, using a standard QWERTY keyboard, by JR, Jay Liu, and Myrntillae Nash.
- Top 100 Words in Plover's Dictionary A small tutorial covering the top 100 English words according to Wikipedia. Many of them are briefs and this text gives some insight as to why these strokes are the way they are.
- StenoCycle Driving game - early prototype, but does let you drill your own words and phrases.
Other Typing Sites
Sites not made for steno are not ideal for use with Plover, but they offer good quality practice material for the intermediate stenographer, or to judge your skills with a metric.
Depending on the site, you might want to adjust Plover's spacing setting (before or after).
- TypiNation Multiplayer typing game with a stenography user option. Has a mode to show steno strokes for each word based on the Plover default dictionary.
- keyma.sh Multiplayer typing website public racing rooms.
- monkeytype Some steno users have reported having their scores not saved as they were detected as bot-like Typing game with many different modes, including copy practice, timed practice, and quotes. (The quotes are now available on Steno Jig as well). You may want to change some settings for steno input to work well:
| setting name | setting | notes |
|---|---|---|
| freedom mode | on | Allows you to delete any word, even if typed wrong |
| strict space | on | Spaces are strict. This can make it harder, but it's recommended to keep it on so that you know what is/isn't a prefix or suffix stroke |
| stop on error | off | Allows you to write incorrect characters |
| confidence mode | off | Allows you to backspace |
| quick end | off | If on, means that the test will end as soon as the last word is typed, even if incorrect |
| indicate typos | below/replace | Show typos |
- ZType Vertically scrolling shooter: write the words to shoot them. Nice graphics and sound effects. Press enter to save yourself with one of your three bombs, asterisk/backspace to unlock it when it locks onto the wrong word.
- TypeRacer Now bans steno users who show up in leaderboards, a sudden flip after years of steno users being allowed on the site Online realtime typing competition. Use the steno universe to avoid getting banned (but it does mean racing against fewer real people). There is an input character limit which can get in the way when writing fast or writing phrases. You can install this user script to get around the limit (instructions).
- 10 Fast Fingers Bans steno users who break 100WPM Short test of most common words.
- Nitro Type Best to use 1ms key delay for all keys to register depending on your operating system A competitive typing game with a car racing theme. Pressing enter skips a the next word. It uses a stop on error method, which can make multistroking hard. It also has a lot of science words and other less common words. There is also a steno team for people to join.