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

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

#61

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 handwriti…

I wish the same would exist for reading. One sentence at a time.

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

#62

That's great. Alternatively, after a few decades of wishing otherwise, I've accepted that for me the decision is between take notes via typing and don't take notes . I fully get the value of handwriting things. I wish it weren't physically painful for me to write more than a paragraph, but it is, and has been since I was a kid. (And I've tried literally everything I could find to "fix" that. It's not from lack of try…

I know what you mean about writing causing pain in the hands and wrists... Have you ever tried cursive? I can write much longer and with less pain when using cursive - really night and day.

> Have you ever tried cursive?

Isn't that what people over 6yo use? I can't tell if I misunderstood the question or just experienced some serious culture shock...

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

#63
post #40

I can believe it. I firmly believe the brain acts very differently between typing and handwriting. I make stupid mistakes all the time when I type. Not misspelling, but those easy there/their/theyre type mistakes. I think it's because I'm just mindlessly trying to express my opinion as fast as possible. I don't write nearly as much as I type, but I've never made such a mistake when writing. Somewhere between the slow…

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…

That's a neat observation.

Each handwritten letter requires distinct motor skills (manipulating pen angles, pressure etc.), whereas each keyboard-typed letter requires a much smaller set of nearly identical motor skills (just a "tap").

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

#64
post #11

After years of putting off handwriting Japanese since almost all of my communication was verbal or over the internet where I had to type it - my experience was that writing is vastly more important than people make it out to be. Especially the kind of people who are only interested in verbal communication (of which I was one). My experience mirrors this study for Japanese at least. Instead of typing sentences for voc…

When I learned Japanese, I realised after a while I could recognise a few kanji, but could visualise barely any of them. As in, I could use the language already, but if you asked me to write some hiragana character, I'd be totally stuck.

Practicing writing, even with apps made for that purpose helped a lot.

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

#65

(n=1 here) Hard disagree. Typing Chinese is so much faster and easier than writing by hand. Sure, I don‘t learn how to write it. But my dopamine-addicted web 5.0 brain would not have kept up with the slow pace of learning by handwriting anyways.

I find though that it's impossible to read cursive (hand-written) Chinese unless you've written a lot yourself (with the correct stroke order). Read printed Chinese and type using pinyin, sure. Read hand-written Chinese - no way.

(n=1, too)

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

#66

> N=42 This is noise.

1. There's more to determining if an effect is in the statistical noise than just sample size. Effect size, for example, also comes into play.

2. Not every study will, or even should, try to be the final word on some matter. If you come up with some novel hypothesis in social science, you're not going to jump into a 2,000 person study.

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean about writing causing pain in the hands and wrists... Have you ever tried cursive? I can write much longer and with less pain when using cursive - really night and day.

> Have you ever tried cursive? Isn't that what people over 6yo use? I can't tell if I misunderstood the question or just experienced some serious culture shock...

I'm in the U.S. and I learned cursive about that age. I'm 30 now, and the only thing I write in cursive these days is my signature (which for the record looks awful). I'm fairly certain cursive is no longer taught in public schools in my area.

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

#68

> N=42 This is noise.

It might be noise, but you can't tell from N=42 alone.

It is possible to find "significant" results with small groups (my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the proportion of success between the groups must differ by more than 30 percentage points to be pNote the supplementary materials [1]. I don't understand them without the paper, but they sure do have a lot of "*** p (Entirely unrelated side note: A shame that Sci-Hub currently does not add papers due to litigation...)

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797621993...

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever tried cursive? Isn't that what people over 6yo use? I can't tell if I misunderstood the question or just experienced some serious culture shock...

I'm in the U.S. and I learned cursive about that age. I'm 30 now, and the only thing I write in cursive these days is my signature (which for the record looks awful). I'm fairly certain cursive is no longer taught in public schools in my area.

So people just write in block letters instead?

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

#70
post #40

I can believe it. I firmly believe the brain acts very differently between typing and handwriting. I make stupid mistakes all the time when I type. Not misspelling, but those easy there/their/theyre type mistakes. I think it's because I'm just mindlessly trying to express my opinion as fast as possible. I don't write nearly as much as I type, but I've never made such a mistake when writing. Somewhere between the slow…

Wow. Yeah, I never made this connection before. I type you instead of your frequently, mix up homophones like your/you're and there/their/they're etc. reasonably frequently. I very rarely make these mistakes in hand writing OR on my iPhone; only at the keyboard.

Interesting. I definitely noticed the same issue with my English.

My mother tongue Croatian had a reconstruction of the alphabet in the 19th century and these kinds of issues never appear. The orthography is phonemic almost. So the word you think matches to each tap when thinking of how it sounds.

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