How to learn Quikscript
How I did it: 8 days in a row, disciplining myself for ~1 hour each day, I practiced the symbols in the Quikscript manuel, about 5 each day on grid/graph paper, I now write virtually all my notes in Quikscript.
It's a simple matter of discipline. My ideolect doesn't use all the symbols, so I just went with how I hear myself speaking, rather than all the rules it gave. As long as I can read and understand my own notes, its fine by me. Knowing a bit about linguistics and phonetics helped (look these up on Wikipedia if you want a crash course).
The fact that each symbol was so short and flowing, and that I was still using ENGLISH helped a lot. I thought it would be much more overwhelming that it was. It is not. You just need the discipline. In the end, I spent more time thinking about how I would eventually learn it than the time it took to learn it.
Out of all the things you can learn by yourself, this is one of the EASIEST, especially if you are not a perfectionist about it. Since my whole purpose in learning this was to streamline my note-taking, it was easy to just do it. Force yourself to write all your notes in it, and it's just like learning to type-- it becomes second nature relatively quickly.
It's been ~2.5 years now, and writing in Quikscript has become such the lazy way for me that I now have to STOP myself from writing in it when I am writing something to someone else. Definitely worth it-- even if your friends aren't interested in learning it.
Lessons & tips: This was so simple, all my "lessons and tips" are:
1 hour each day, don't skip a single day if you want to learning it fast (8 days for me), and FORCE yourself to use it at the very end of learning the entire alphabet.
Use grid/graph paper to help you in learning the new shapes.
At the end of each lesson, form as many words as you can think of out of the letters you've learned. Then try to read them.
I also formed a sentence that used every letter I had learned up through that point as a kind of "cumulative review" at the very end of each lesson.
Resources: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/quikscript.htm has all the links you need; it helps if you know/learn what the IPA symbols mean, but it's not essential if you use the official manual.
