There are so many Dragon Shouts, twenty actually, but for anyone looking to unlock all the shouts and their most powerful versions, multiply that times three. So, actually, that's sixty different words to find. Granted some can be earned automatically through quests, but the majority of them require a lot of dungeon trekking. Oh they aren't hard to find, easy as hell to find actually, since you can get their locations on your map, just well, for anyone who would plan on learning all the shouts on the characters they roll, that's repeating those same near sixty quests over and over again, unless of course you don't plan on learning all of the shouts.

It's just so overwhelming and daunting, the concept of learning all the shouts on multiple characters and makes using fast travel more and more tempting. I'm still playing my first character and plan to learn all the shouts and already it's getting tiring, since I only have eleven of the total shouts and only all three words for some of them. The concept of doing all of this all over again on another character seems completely unappealing since doing it once already is so exhausting. I think my problem is that I have been word gathering non-stop for the past two days and ignoring other things I can do in the game, so that's probably why I feel so overwhelmed by this. So...in my opinion, I would say, if you wanted only get all the shouts on one character and then only go with the essentials or ones you like on another. -.- Other than that I am loving Skyrim. This has GOTY in the bag.

bump

I personally think you'd be insane to try and get all the shouts on every character you play (considering i'm up to about 6 characters at the moment). I found one of my characters primarily using the whirlwind sprint and ice-form shouts (with occasional fus-ro-dah of course), while another one preferred the aura whisper one, go for which ever ones suit your playstyle.
As for getting all the shouts, it is supposed to be time consuming, difficult and borderline frustrating, it is after all, an achievement ;p

Yeah, it definitley IS time consuming and frustrating, however, I want them all on just one of my characters, so I can try that out. Next character I definitely won't see myself needing all of them.

Getting the words may be time consuming, but you also have to kill a LOT of dragons to power them.

I'm not too worried about that. I've gotten lucky and have fought upwards of forty so far. It's almost to the point I fight several in one day within the game world.

Bump. Anyone else besides me agree with this? Word hunting takes some serious commitment.