Handwriting may be "better" but typing may turn out to be adequate –if current trends are any indication.
Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
111–120 of 128 posts
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Schools stopped teaching it Wow. Do kids not have hand written assignments anymore? I can't even imagine having to write out, say a 5 page essay, in block letters by hand.
I just asked my nephew (17) and niece (21) about this.
Both went to good Catholic schools in the Midwest. Neither had to learn cursive.
They say that they haven’t hand written assignments for many years. My niece, a university student, doesn't even know what “blue books” are.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#113I 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 made tons of mistakes when writing. It's the reason there's an eraser on the back of the pencil and lots of larger erasers as well as things like white-out
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#114Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#115I 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…
im thinking about note taking programs that have a distraction-free mode or append-only mode... maybe a slow mode where you can only type as fast as you can write would help somewhat
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#116I keep todo-lists in a notebook, because I never managed to keep track of things otherwise. Once they're written down in a notebook, however, I just don't seem to forget them.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#117I really wished that my country had used the Arabic script, which goes from right to left. I am left-handed, which means that your hand and pen obscure the last part that you have written. Consequently, my handwriting is pretty horrible. I would expect that left-handed Arabic writers do somewhat better than right-handed ones.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#118In the Arabic script letters change their form depending on the letters before and after[0]. It is a lot easier to understand this when you try to write the letters by hand.
[0] This is also true for all handwriting in a cursive style. It can be avoided by using block letters, but this is less efficient because you have to lift your pen frequently, which is slower than just moving it into a new direction.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#119The volunteers who wrote by hand learned unfamiliar letters more quickly , and did better on some related tasks after a small number of alphabet lessons: 'naming letters, writing letters, spelling words, and reading words'. It's not very surprising that physically forming a set of symbols will get their shapes into your head quicker than simply pressing the corresponding buttons. But that doesn't tell us much about a…
You have my upvote. "Learning languages" by what people most often mean by the phrase is very different and distinct activity than learning letters. Yeah, you need letters to read and write, but most of the learning required to learn a language is spent almost entirely in a different modality.
If you want to be able to read a language you must be familiar with the script that it is written with. Some languages do not even have a notion of letters. In Japanese a basic notion is the Kanji (and there are really many of them). There is no way to pronounce an individual Kanji because its interpretation depends on the Kanji around it.
In the end, this really depends on what you call "Learning languages", learning to speak and understand others might be far easier that learning to read and write that language.
Re: Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds
#120> N=42 This is noise.
42 happens to be the answer to the "Universal Question About Life, The Universe and Everything". [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
PS: I get it that some people will down-vote this because jokes like this do not really stimulate an intellectual discussion. But reading something by Douglas Adams is a really good idea.