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

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.

The article is talking about how learning is facilitated by handwriting in a way that typing does not, and not about which results in more quickly produced text. (Also, it should be clear that how well you know the language will also put a bound on how fast you type.)

None of this is news. I've had teachers tell me this years ago. Writing engages the brain in a way that typing keys does not. That a study corroborates this claim is not surprising to me.

That said, the memory pathway should work for reading and writing, that is, recognition and production. I need a further skillset (pronunciation) in order to do that production on a computer, since being able to write individual characters by hand without any knowledge of the words or pronunciation isn't very useful.

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 conjugations for every verb that was taught, handwriting translations to and from Greek, etc. What I found was that even though I never actually went back to the previous notes, I had good recall of the information that I practiced in this fashion. I think (but what do I know?) that part of it was the spatial component to the note-taking. I can't find stuff in code that I've written without searching,² but I could go back to my handwritten notes from learning Greek (2017–2019) and find, say, what I had written about the aorist passive without much difficulty.³

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1. https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/

2. You might think, “big deal—then search” but what if the search is not by some thing easily turned into text but rather some concept which I don't remember exactly what I typed to do it, or the searchable thing ends up being some bit of text that recurs so frequently that the search is effectively useless. I have a much easier time finding things I've read on paper from my personal library of around 1200 printed books than I do finding something I've read online even with the fast searching capabilities of the internet (although I will admit that it's a lot easier to find disposable writing again online than in print).

3. That spatial context helps in other ways too—I can find things from grad school notes (2002–6) pretty easily as well and there was one time in 1999 that I pulled up a quote from a book that I'd read in 1992 (which had no index) in just a couple minutes thanks to my memory of roughly where in the book and where on a page spread the passage appeared.⁴

4. Yes, I know that, especially with that last anecdote that I'm getting into stuff that's likely well outside the norm, but the basic point that spatial context helps with memory is something that's well-studied and documented. We don't get that with typing on a screen.

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 slower pace, or not being distracted by 100 things going on a screen, makes things feel more deliberate and carefully chosen.