Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language, study finds • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #91

elliekelly wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In college I used to handwrite out all my notes and prepare cheat sheets for tests but I would never refer back to them. Just the action of writing them out helped me to remember things much better than my normally lousy memory.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by yodelshady » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 4:49 PM UTC

aspyct wrote: post #49

dhosek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree. Returning to my notes is the most important thing I do. I just don't have enough space in my working memory for all the content we go through per day, all the different topics. It's fine if you handle a thing or two, but a totally different topic if you're jumping around meeting after meeting.

That sounds fine, but almost by definition not the subject matter of "learning".

I'd expect if you're at the meeting, you've probably learnt something of value. Otherwise I'd just invite the notebook.

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

#123

Post by yodelshady » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #13

MAGZine wrote: post #3

I 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.

It normally takes me about 2-3 hours to get through a one-hour online lecture. But I actually do get through them. As an undergrad, with in-person lectures, I learnt maybe 50% of the content with a good lecturer. 30% with a bad one.

Well worth the change.

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

#124

Post by muffinman26 » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:48 PM UTC

zsmi wrote: post #82

csa wrote: post #78

Earlier 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.

A 5 page essay probably wouldn't be written by hand (to make sure everyone wrote a consistent 5 pages), but in-person tests certainly are. In college/high school I remember having to write 2 essays in two hours long-hand for multiple tests in the last decade. We just use block letters.

People in my generation find cursive illegible and clumsy, but with practice writing block letters can be plenty fast.

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

#125

Post by physicsguy » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 8:02 AM UTC

When I did some pedagogical stuff for teaching at a University, we were told that overwhelmingly the evidence pointed that writing notes led to better recall than when using computers for taking notes, and it was thought that it was because it requires some degree of processing - many people are able to type fast enough to almost verbatim copy down what is being said in lectures but almost nobody (aside from those who can do shorthand proficiently) can do so with writing. So people have to select the important parts to note, and in doing so that seems to help people remember it better.

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

#126

Post by makeitdouble » Wed, Jul 14, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

physicsguy wrote: post #125

When I did some pedagogical stuff for teaching at a University, we were told that overwhelmingly the evidence pointed that writing notes led to better recall than when using computers for taking notes, and it was thought that it was because it requires some degree of processing - many people are able to type fast enough to almost verbatim copy down what is being said in lectures but almost nobody (aside from those wh…

We are in a field where we get to experience these ideas head first.

For instance I remember having to learn how git works, and followed online videos on the base concepts, tutorials with commands to type etc. Most importantly there was no paper nor handwriting involved at any point.

I personally don’t feel like it was holding me down and it would have been a royal pain to introduce a non digital media in the middle of it.

I’d wagger I’m not the only one, and the majority of us got to terms with digital learning and how to be efficient with it.

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

#127

Post by physicsguy » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 8:43 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #126

physicsguy wrote: post #125

When I did some pedagogical stuff for teaching at a University, we were told that overwhelmingly the evidence pointed that writing notes led to better recall than when using computers for taking notes, and it was thought that it was because it requires some degree of processing - many people are able to type fast enough to almost verbatim copy down what is being said in lectures but almost nobody (aside from those wh…

We are in a field where we get to experience these ideas head first. For instance I remember having to learn how git works, and followed online videos on the base concepts, tutorials with commands to type etc. Most importantly there was no paper nor handwriting involved at any point. I personally don’t feel like it was holding me down and it would have been a royal pain to introduce a non digital media in the middle…

That's quite different to taking notes in for e.g. a lecture on something though, which was the sort of environment I was talking about.

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

#128

Post by makeitdouble » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

physicsguy wrote: post #127

makeitdouble wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are in a field where we get to experience these ideas head first. For instance I remember having to learn how git works, and followed online videos on the base concepts, tutorials with commands to type etc. Most importantly there was no paper nor handwriting involved at any point. I personally don’t feel like it was holding me down and it would have been a royal pain to introduce a non digital media in the middle…

That's quite different to taking notes in for e.g. a lecture on something though, which was the sort of environment I was talking about.

It might feel foreign to a lot of us, but looking at primary school kids lessons recently, they don't take any "notes" proper. They get prints, and go through the concepts one by one writing on white boards and rewriting mindmaps node by node to see how much they remember.

They still have to write a lot, but outside of the white board stuff it's mostly small essays.

Same way as I don't think we're taking full notes when going to seminars, as we get the slides and potentially full recordings of the talks. We'll right down pointers to core concept we might want to get back to again later, but at no point we're writing down as a learning exercice or to persist whole blocks of info. At least that's my experience.