First let me show you my daily handwriting of the four characters provided as an example by Augustus Chen, see below (plus the official spelling):
You can see the significant reduction in strokes: the original four charaters have 30 strokes in total, but I can write them down for 1 to 3 strokes per character without causing much ambiguity (I believe confidently that my quick handwriting is recognizable to most native Chinese). In this way, note taking is largely accelerated. In fact, I can compress my note to almost one to two strokes per character on average, but that will only be identifiable to myself. Everybody has his or her own way of shorthand.
Actually, during the long history of the development of Chinese characters, calligraphers have developed a branch of calligraphy refered to as cursive calligraphy, which features both the fast writing speed and aesthetic perception. Following are some of the great works of cursive calligraphy by ancient Chinese calligraphers:
- Wang Xianzhi
2. Wang Xizhi
, and also a great poet and oriental philosopher.
3. Huai Su
I would like to recommend a website http://www.shufaai.com/a/zidian/caoshu/ that translates your input character into a cursive calligraphy character (basically search in the ancient cursive handwriting database). Following are some of the searching results: (史, 谢 in order):
Hope my answer helps.
EDIT: Wow, more than 200 upvotes! Totally unbelievable for a new starter on Quora. Thx! Thx! Thx!
Footnotes