6 weeks of phoenix.md

Things That Might Be Off-putting

• It feels like Phoenix uses the asterisk much more than Plover, at least for beginner/common stuff. So if this puts you off...For me it has mostly been fine, but things like *PBG for "-nk" where you have to "reach over" the -FR have given me some trouble. Especially when paired with right-hand vowels: I had to drill *EUPBG ("-ink") relentlessly before it started feeling comfortable. It helped a lot to think of it as "-ing" with a reach for the star, instead of prioritizing the star and letting that pull my hand out of place/shape.
• There is something to be said for Plover's mature dictionary. The Phoenix dictionary is fairly good-sized, but it's still a starter dictionary. I've added more words than I did with Plover.
• It's human-curated, so while most of the inconsistencies are due to the quirks of the English language, I have definitely found several definitions that were wrong or missing.
• It uses prefixes and suffixes much more than Plover, so many common words aren't actually "in" the dictionary and won't be found by Plover's suggestions window.
• It uses -Z for the plural "-s", so that's a bit more of a reach (I think Plover often uses -S?).
• It (generally) recommends not folding in "-ed" and "-s" endings, since they conflict fairly often. Many words are defined with the endings folded in, but probably not as often as with Plover.
• They have sometimes given the bare stroke to a word or affix that I would consider less important, and the common word gets the asterisk. So it has an optional system for sort of sounding-out numbers instead of using the number bar, so WUN is "1", and "one" requires you to stroke W*UN. Similarly, suffixes usually take priority, so LAEUT is "-ilate" and "late" gets pushed to "LAET". And I have gotten used to it, and once you practice the asterisk enough it's no big deal, but I would probably have done those the other way around.

Things I Like

It's much more consistent than Plover. It's hard to overemphasize just how much difference this makes. They have trimmed down the rule set slightly so there are fewer "valid" ways to stroke things, and then defined all of them.

Running through the Gutenberg sentences, I've only methodically worked through the top 1000 words or so, but I can pick an exercise anywhere up to about 3500 words and generally only have trouble with one or two of them. And even taking my time and fumbling for a couple words, I'm still averaging about 40 WPM on those drills.

Yeah. I started to make this a list, but I think it all comes down to consistency. When I find a word that I don't know how to write, it's almost always a rule (or more often, a prefix) that I didn't know, or hadn't fully internalized, or some weirdness of the English language.

I don't find the extra strokes to be an issue. The endings (-R, -Z, -D, etc.) get used so often that they're completely automatic and you just tap them while your brain is processing the next stroke. At least as a beginner they don't feel like they take extra time, you just absent-mindedly hit them in the space between other strokes.

And the simpler more predictable strokes just happen faster. I have started incorporating a fair number of briefs, but it takes a surprisingly long time before I can one-stroke something faster than the two-stroke phonetic outline that I don't have to think about.

And there are briefs. And even the briefs are fairly consistent. I've lost track of how many times I've one-stroked something and then thought, "wait a minute, I've never briefed that word before."