Technology extends but also amputates. See character amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
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
#72I 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…
Excellent insight. Thank you.
Since listening to a Lex Fridman podcast on how one hemisphere of the brain is more devoted to language than the other, I've been thinking about just how complex language is. I've never agreed with some linguists like Chomsky that speak about language as necessary for thought, mostly because my own mental language is far more physical and symbolic than linguistic. At one point in my life, for example, I was able to look at construction drawings and point to the weakest part of a structural system. That's not my brain using language. That's something else.
That said, something that just occurred to me after reading your comment is this: Over time we're having to translate this communication thing into different arenas. My fingers have memorized how to type most words. I wouldn't be able to type as fast as I do if they didn't. My eyes and brain have obviously memorized words at a glance. My ears have memorized words in person, which sound different than they do from a computer or television. They've also memorized the sound of words from 0.5x speed to 3x speed because of all the podcasts I listen to.
I guess where I'm going with this is that we're putting larger and larger demands on our brains. The, oh what to call it, increasing dimensionality of communication? That, whatever that is, it feels so mentally taxing and I can't imagine that is ever going away. If anything it will continue to increase as societies and technologies get more complex.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#73When I was first learning programming I would carefully handwrite simple code to memorize correct syntax. It was a useful context switch when I was tired of normal exercises.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#74When I was learning Spanish I first tried a variety of apps and cds and at least for me none really worked.
What did help, was basically creating my own handwritten handbook on how the language works, drills, usage examples, etc. Not just writing it down, but visualizing it. E.g. making little drawings where on the timeline all the different grammatical tenses lie. Still to this day, many years later and without any clue where the physical handbook is, I still often mentally pull it up when I'm not sure on how to say something.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#75(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.
Heh, its just a paper reporting results that they found. There is nothing really to disagree, as it is not an opinion. I think science reporting should provide this context rather than produce some kind of headline that is treated as The Truth :)
Anyway, when I was trying to learn French, I found that for myself no single method worked. I learnt by reading, listening, writing, conversing, singing some random french song, etc. My belief is that learning is multimodal, and there is support for this view in literature. I think these types of studies are still valuable as they control for one variable and provide some insight on that. I'm sure we will slowly converge on the learning model most likely to promote long term retention.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#76This is definitely true I found for learning Chinese characters. Using Pinyin input to do everything results in character amnesia, by drilling on writing the characters makes it easier to recall them when you see them next time.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#77Well this does not bode well if I get back to learning Taiwanese Mandarin :|
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes.
Schools stopped teaching it (even many “good” schools). People largely don’t use it except for signatures.
I personally switched to block letters a long time ago because I can’t read my own cursive when I am writing quickly. My penmanship sucks.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#79I totally get this. If I need to focus and truly understand something, there is no replacement for writing. Keyboards are fast, but the interaction patterns frequently devolve to almost squirrely behaviour. rapid movements, editing, and fleeting thoughts. It encourages you to move from one thought to the next as quickly as possible. Our MODE of measurement when typing is measured in WPM--how quickly you can output te…
OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example), handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
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Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#80That'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…
The thing is, that returning to your notes is the least important part of taking notes. What writing notes longhand does is do a better job of encoding what you're taking notes about into your long-term memory. Anecdata: As part of an ongoing project,¹ I spent about two years teaching myself Biblical Greek. As part of this project, I ended up filling a couple notebooks with handwritten notes—writing out tables of con…
You seem to be heavily focusing on your own memory and how taking the notes impacts you, when others (me at least) need notes mostly for future reference.
I’m not trying to remember in 20 years what order I need to deploy code. I won’t care in two weeks about my TODO of the week.
I don’t even _want_ to be aware of the log extracts and where they are stored in the folders and what we discussed about them, hopefully nothing happens and we can all forget.
Note taking as an adult is fundamentally different to me from the note taking I did as a kid who was supposed to pass tests with nothing more than a pen on the table.