Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds

I know for me, writing on a page forces me to commit to a spacial organization for the information— partitioning it into lists, leaving blank lines where I think there's going to be more to add, drawing arrows and connections and so on.

Digital notes don't have any of those constraints, so I don't have to be nearly as disciplined about it. But counterintuitively, this doesn't generally lead to me going back and "cleaning up" my digital notes into a properly organized reference; instead it just stays a garbled mess.

Kind of like how I can't do cardio as its own activity, but I'll happily commit to an 8km year round bike commute. I can only get the benefit when it's a forced side effect of something else.

I think the benefit here is that handwriting forces you to be parsimonious. You simply cannot mindlessly transcribe words onto a page as fast as you can type onto a screen.

As a result, you have compress the information into a distilled format - this requires understanding. If you're just typing - transcribing really - you are not forced to understand, only touch type.

If this is the actual mechanism - that handwriting forces you to understand - then I have also have an alternative which includes typing.

That is, "take notes twice."

I always have a transcribed set of notes (anything which could possibly be relevant), and then a "curated" set which compresses the relevant and tosses the irrelevant. Yes, it takes more effort; yes, it takes more time. That is the cost of understanding. Personally I've found this to work better for me than handwriting.

I learn by taking notes. I have notebooks full of notes... but I don't ever actually refer back to them. Just the act of writing things down helps me remember things.

I'd say this is true for learning anything. Taking hand-written notes has always led to better recall for me than typing notes.

I think there’s a certain “muscle memory” involved. When you’re writing a word by hand you have to think about each letter, however briefly, as you write it: “w-o-r-d”. But when you’re typing a word you don’t think about each letter so much as you think about the pattern your fingers need to make, if that makes sense?

It’s like when someone asks what the keyboard shortcut is to take a screenshot. Uh, I don’t know? I use it all the time and I couldn’t tell you if I’m hitting control or command or option because the underlying inputs don’t really matter. I only need to know the pattern my fingers are supposed to make and so that’s all that gets committed to memory.