14 ms·

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

238 points by lnyan 5y ago

markus_zhang 5y ago
On a side note, I find writing and drawing very useful when I tried to get through some algorithm questions or similar things that need a bit of thought. Writing and drawing weed out the edge cases pretty effectively and I can better cut the question into pieces in that way. I also found that if I can't sort out my thoughts in written forms, there is no way for the code to work. Somehow it's a lot easier to setup mental barriers (to focus or to reduce problems into pieces) when I'm writing.
dahfizz 5y ago
I wish they would do studies like this with children / teenagers. In an adult, handwriting is going to be ingrained in their brain because they have been doing it their whole life. It is a part of the language processing their brain does, and it makes sense that tapping in to that helps their brain learn faster. I want to see if the same is true for children who type way more than they handwrite. Is there something innately better about handwriting, or is it just that the brain learns better using ingrained methods?
- asciimov 5y ago
  > I wish they would do studies like this with children / teenagers. They have. I don't have said studies in front of me. But the gist of it seems to be that typing is a quicker lower process skill (pushing a button), where as handwriting is a slower higher intensive process, (thinking about the letters you write). My opinion is that physical note taking, when not transcribing, requires you to process the information you are given, then summarizing it in your own words. With the benefit of handwriting being that you have more time to process the information.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I'm not sure there are much variety. For context, there is long debate between schools/parents who think keeping handwriting at school is a waste of time, and those who argue it is primordial to learning. And it's not just theoretical, some schools are really pushing hard one direction or the other. While I don't completely agree with the first camp, most studies done by the second camp are focused on how copying stuff during lectures brings better retention when handwritten compared to typed. My issue with that view is that copying lectures on a computer is mildly stupid in the first place. Why don't they share the slides and text and let the students focus on hearing and understanding the lecture instead ? Ideally they don't need any notes except for future reference on numbers, names or formulas. Students should be typing to produce content on their own, not to transcribe speeches. If learning has to happen on computers, IMO it needs to be done differently and not just an ersatz of what we were doing with pen, paper and blackboards. That reflection is already happening in some way, it just has nothing to do with the political fights around removing hand writing from school.
voisin 5y ago
I wonder if the writing confers the same benefits where the characters are the same as the learner’s native language. Here they used Arabic and so I wonder if there is something to the learners connecting writing new characters to new words/syntax/etc, versus if the characters had been the same.
- sheer_audacity 5y ago
  Letters change shape depending on where they are in the word, so almost certainly! :)
MAGZine 5y ago
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 text. Writing... is not that. Yes, you can rush. But it's slower, and I find that it helps me stay on single lines of thought. There's no manic jumping around, edit here, edit there. You can write the words, slowly even, and ruminate in their meaning. Computers are unparalleled for editing, but I just don't find it as good of a medium for creating things that require large spurts of unbroken thought. And it's not that you CAN'T produce good, creative, well-thought through things behind a keyboard (we all do it to some extent every day), it's just not _as good_ of a medium for it.
- ozzythecat 5y ago
  > Writing... is not that. Yes, you can rush. But it's slower, and I find that it helps me stay on single lines of thought. There's no manic jumping around, edit here, edit there. You can write the words, slowly even, and ruminate in their meaning. I really like what you’ve said here. This rings true for me as well. For years I was on a hunt for a better note taking app. I tried everything from a basic Mac notes app to Sublime Text to more niche tools like Omnifocus. Every time I ended up writing out the most critical notes by hand in a spiral notebook because it was more effective for me personally to retain that information.
- gowld 5y ago
  OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example), handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
  - cguess 5y ago
    Learn some form of shorthand, and learn how to summarize on the go. Writing down word-for-word what a professor is saying is not going to work well. For that, bring a tape recorder (or an iPhone if you want to kill your battery) and retake your notes later when you can pause, rewind, etc.
unlikelymordant 5y ago
If handwriting is better than typing, is there some other way of representing words that is better than handwriting? Perhaps other than speaking? Is it just because these are the first methods we learn to represent language? Or is it because there are more degrees of freedom in handwriting, i.e. more ways of getting things wrong so you have to focus a lot more.
- musingsole 5y ago
  It doesn't transfer as easily to other people but mindmaps or lukasa (for an ancient predecessor) are infinitely information dense and naturally built to the particularities of their builder's mind.
sheer_audacity 5y ago
Interesting they used Arabic for this example - I grew up learning it at school but it’s only recently that smartphone keyboards are good enough to implement abjad. Most of the time you used to just switch to arabizi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet Writing in Arabic is really fun as well, calligraphy is appreciated.
karmakaze 5y ago
I certainly feel the same way about remember ideas in diagrams. A napkin/notebook drawing is so much better than using a design tool with a mouse.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
I feel like the needing to forget your base keymap would make learning with a keyboard much harder. A made up example if I saw the new letter for "s", I'd tell myself it's located where "k" is and then I'd be confused if it was k or s when I saw it.
Nadya 5y ago
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 vocabulary learning I have a journal where I write them instead. I'd say I learn words and kanji more quickly ever since I made that change. So while the study was for Arabic, and from scratch, my experience is from Japanese and roughly 1 - 1.5 years into learning (so wasn't a novice/from scratch at that point).
- viraptor 5y ago
  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.
gowld 5y ago
Same for taking notes when listening to a lecture or reading a book.
fouric 5y ago
This article, my personal experience, what I've heard from my friends, and the other evidence I've heard of all seem to support the same thing: that writing things by hand leads to better retention than typing. This seems to be the input-level dual of the meme that reading from physical paper leads to greater retention than from a computer screen. I'm curious as to what the cause could be for this one, as it seems less intuitive than the writing case. Back to writing: I've found that while writing things down, I'm often "bandwidth-limited" - not only can I not write nearly as fast as I can think, but I often run into this limit on a practical level, where I continually have a "buffer" of sentences that I want to write and I'm just waiting for my fingers to put them down on paper. Perhaps learning shorthand would allow me both bandwidth and retention?
- rpastuszak 5y ago
  >This seems to be the input-level dual of the meme that reading from physical paper leads to greater retention than from a computer screen. I'm curious as to what the cause could be for this one, as it seems less intuitive than the writing case. One of the possible reasons would be that we consume text content on paper differently than on the screen. Another reason would be that when you read text on paper you engage with a unique physical object. Engaging multiple senses and adding more cues/anchors helps with creating stronger connections in your brain and improves memory retention. That's also probably why writing things down with a pen helps you remember more and for longer--more parts of your brain are involved in the process of note taking.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  The physical act of writing engages the brain more than typing on a keyboard does. I claim that the physical motion and having to form shapes, as well as the more tangible spatial procession of your physical movement across the page reinforces the memory through association in a way that just pushing a key does not. Your hand is very intimately involved in making those marks on paper. Pushing buttons causes things to appear on a screen, but there is little tactile engagement and it isn't very differentiated (all pushes of a key are approximately the same). Writing is also more deliberate, whereas you can type while half asleep. The quality of your writing also depends on effort. Typed letters appear the same no matter how you press the key. You are mainly concerned about pushing the correct key, but how to press it is unimportant and there isn't much room for variation anyway.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> "The question out there for parents and educators is why should our kids spend any time doing handwriting," says cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp from Johns Hopkins University. On one side, more data is better, whatever the subject is (42 volunteer subjects though, and at no point in the abstract it’s explained how they sampled them). One the other hand, it looks like yet another of these studies, that has a very clear agenda, with a very small sample, completely focused on a single issue. If at least it was adressing it directly and focused on kids at school, but here it’s still a small proxy supposed to represent a bigger trend.
kstrauser 5y ago
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 trying.) Instead, I'm stuck in the second rate world of typing my notes like a peasant, shackled with vast tooling that lets me selectively encrypt sensitive parts, sync them across all my devices, instantly search through everything, turn notes into reminders with a tap of a button, and otherwise just barely scrape by. I get it. I'm cheating myself by not scribbling my thoughts onto a dead tree (or a Remarkable, etc.). I'm OK with that.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  Gives side-eye in fountain pen. I really do prefer fountain pen on nice paper, but there are times where you just need software.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    There's a Lamy Safari sitting next to me, on top of a Rhodia Webnotebook. If there's a gun to my head and I have to handwrite something, it's far and away my favorite tool. It's the least painful of everything I've tried.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Followup: I realize I'm replying more to other comments in this HN thread about handwriting notes being superior to typing them, which isn't at all what the article's about. The article said handwriting is better for learning a language, and that seems to intuitively make sense. It didn't talk about note taking in general.
- dhosek 5y ago
  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 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 --- 1. https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ 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.
momirlan 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Arabic is a special case for a person using the Latin alphabet. Would it be true for trying to learn another language using the same alphabet ? That is not tested in the article.
twirligigue 5y ago
Is this because we learnt to write before we learnt to type?
- raegis 5y ago
  This is a great question.
zihotki 5y ago
I wonder if the same experience can be applied to other languages. That's because in the experiment the subjects were learning another language with completely different alphabet from English. The study was done, I assume, in US since the university is located there. It for sure will apply when learning Mandarin or Katakana. But will it apply when learning a language from same language family like Dutch? From my personal experience if the alphabet is known for you then there is no need to write by hand. Typing could be even more efficient if you're typing fast. That makes it easy to quickly go through a lot of excercises for writing. And fast reading and reading a lot are another important factors to the success.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
(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.
- TKZZ 5y ago
  Maybe in the short term, and to learn the basics/conversational Chinese, however I believe in order to fully and best understand the writing system it's still best to learn how to write the characters. Plus, the deliberate act of creating the characters stroke-by-stroke seems to better implant them in my brain more than just typing out some pinyin, but maybe that's just me. Spending 5-10 minutes writing a character helps me remember the meaning and shape of it much better than an hour doing pinyin/duolingo esque practice. But I still probably can never see myself memorizing some of the more complex characters that even native Chinese folks have problems with :P
- bobthechef 5y ago
  > Typing Chinese is so much faster and easier than writing by hand. 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.
- claudiawerner 5y ago
  I'm learning Japanese, and I'm learning the kanji using Heisig's Remembering The Kanji method. I combine that with flashcards on Anki on my PC. When it shows a keyword card, I'll write out the character on paper or I'll trace it in the air with my finger, then check if I got it right. That works surprisingly well to memorize them. 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.
mleonhard 5y ago
Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797621993111 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797621993111
axaxs 5y ago
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 slower pace, or not being distracted by 100 things going on a screen, makes things feel more deliberate and carefully chosen.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  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.
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    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.
- Olreich 5y ago
  I wonder if this has to do with how fast typing is. Is there similarly diminished learning in very slow typers? Does a shorthand expert fail to learn as much?
- jeofken 5y ago
  This is an original thought to me. I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed rather than handwritten.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  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 use it all the time and I couldn’t tell you if I’m hitting control or command or option because the underlying inputs don’t really matter. I only need to know the pattern my fingers are supposed to make and so that’s all that gets committed to memory.
frazbin 5y ago
As somebody who has congenitally shitty handwriting and usually ignores advice to pick up a pencil: it's still helpful when learning a new language. In fact, my natural crappiness becomes helpful because I have to be incredibly mindful in the act of writing to wind up with anything legible.
crackercrews 5y ago
I wonder if the benefit of handwriting is diminished if the student is using a tablet that converts each handwritten word into text as it is written? Is the benefit just in the act of writing? Does the act of seeing your own handwritten text on a page/screen reinforce the learning?
- alecakin 5y ago
  I wonder this too - I know that I learn much more rapidly and the knowledge "sticks" when I handwrite notes but just anecdotally, I feel like the effect is "lessened" when I handwrite digital notes.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    I know for me, writing on a page forces me to commit to a spacial organization for the information— partitioning it into lists, leaving blank lines where I think there's going to be more to add, drawing arrows and connections and so on. Digital notes don't have any of those constraints, so I don't have to be nearly as disciplined about it. But counterintuitively, this doesn't generally lead to me going back and "cleaning up" my digital notes into a properly organized reference; instead it just stays a garbled mess. Kind of like how I can't do cardio as its own activity, but I'll happily commit to an 8km year round bike commute. I can only get the benefit when it's a forced side effect of something else.
kansface 5y ago
> N=42 This is noise.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  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.
- FabHK 5y ago
  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 p<0.05). They might well have done the maths and might have highly significant p-values. Note the supplementary materials [1]. I don't understand them without the paper, but they sure do have a lot of "*** p < 0.001" results. (Entirely unrelated side note: A shame that Sci-Hub currently does not add papers due to litigation...) [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797621993111 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797621993...
- NotSwift 5y ago
  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_the_Galaxy 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.
alexpetralia 5y ago
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 handwriting forces you to understand - then I have also have an alternative which includes typing. That is, "take notes twice." I always have a transcribed set of notes (anything which could possibly be relevant), and then a "curated" set which compresses the relevant and tosses the irrelevant. Yes, it takes more effort; yes, it takes more time. That is the cost of understanding. Personally I've found this to work better for me than handwriting.
- baby 5y ago
  I wish the same would exist for reading. One sentence at a time.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  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
whalesalad 5y ago
I have better results with handwritten note-taking during dev work than digital. I have a pile of multicolored spiral bound notebooks on my desk that I use for clients/projects. Save a few pages in the beginning of each book for misc/table of contents.
SimianLogic2 5y ago
I learn by taking notes. I have notebooks full of notes... but I don't ever actually refer back to them. Just the act of writing things down helps me remember things.
user3939382 5y ago
I’ll look up the links if anyone’s interested, but FYI this is just the latest in a string of studies that have produced similar results.
nemo44x 5y ago
I'd say this is true for learning anything. Taking hand-written notes has always led to better recall for me than typing notes.
emodendroket 5y ago
Matches my experience learning foreign languages: nobody likes writing words over and over, exactly, but I cannot think of a more effective way to learn them.
psychomugs 5y ago
Technology extends but also amputates. See character amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
evv555 5y ago
When 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.
smoe 5y ago
When 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.
cromwellian 5y ago
This 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.
- HKH2 5y ago
  The other extreme, like at my university, is to drill writing everything (and cover less-interesting topics like telling the time, and almost useless words like '雙胞胎' - how many twins are there in China, Confucius Institute?!) I suspect most of your problem comes from trying to read isolated characters.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    No, actually I can't recognize most characters isolated unless they appear in a sentence. You can see the same issue with writing code. I can read 10 books on writing Rust code, but until I actually undertake some projects and write some real code in an unforgiving environment, I'm not gonna learn as well. The issue with writing characters isn't writing individual characters. It's writing whole sentences, and then facing the inevitable error feedback from others. I get this with Pinyin too because Pinyin autocomplete often inserts the wrong character and I don't notice until it's too late, but that's just it: pinyin autocomplete kind of promotes laziness. 90% of the time it's correct, and so I don't spend a lot of time proof reading it. I have just found hand-writing slows everything down and the muscle memory aids in remembering.
    - cromwellian 5y ago
      Lets just end this on a positive note, I can't argue with anyone who is a fellow M.U.L.E. lover. :)
      - HKH2 5y ago
        Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Well this does not bode well if I get back to learning Taiwanese Mandarin :|
roody15 5y ago
Handwriting notes is better when studying for a test…. study according to myself finds
nvader 5y ago
Will it replicate?
retsibsi 5y ago
The 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 any potential benefits beyond this very early, low-level learning. Learning higher-level features of the language (and even growing your vocabulary, once you've got past the point where letter shapes are a stumbling block) could just as easily be slowed down by handwriting, for the same reasons that it apparently helps in the complete beginner phase -- it forces you to slow down and expend more effort on the low-level task of letter formation.
- GolDDranks 5y ago
  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.
  - NotSwift 5y ago
    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.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  This is exactly true from my experience. When you learn an new writing system, seemingly insignificant differences can have a big impact, and writing by hand forces you to confront them. Consider in Latin the difference between an I and an l, if you have never seen the latin alphabet before this might be quite confusing. Many writing systems have much more subtle differences than this, especially in cursive forms. e.g. if you use a keyboard you will never learn that م and ه are easily confused in Arabic if you don't write them properly. When learning vocabulary you want to focus on throughput. In the long term it does not really matter if you get a letter wrong here or there, it will correct with enough exposure and practice. The important thing is to do as many drills as possible with your chosen space repetition tool. A keyboard is a better tool than a pen for that.
Tainnor 5y ago
The title of this article should really read "Handwriting may be better than typing when learning the Arabic alphabet, underpowered study with n=42 finds". Science reporting really needs to start doing better.
danans 5y ago
Of the six languages I have studied (including Arabic as described in the article), not one of the programs have included using a keyboard, but then again I studied the last of these well over a decade ago. I am surprised keyboards would be used, especially for a language like Arabic whose writing system is inherently "cursive" and pretty deeply tied to the language's cultural identity. Is computer keyboard based language learning actually a significant thing these days?
mistyvales 5y ago
100% agree. It takes more effort for me to write things out and learning a language with repetitive writing works for me so much better.
polynomial 5y ago
Handwriting may be "better" but typing may turn out to be adequate –if current trends are any indication.
fogihujy 5y ago
I 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.
NotSwift 5y ago
I 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.
NotSwift 5y ago
In 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.
physicsguy 5y ago
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.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  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.
  - physicsguy 5y ago
    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.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      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.

238 points by lnyan 5y ago

On a side note, I find writing and drawing very useful when I tried to get through some algorithm questions or similar things that need a bit of thought. Writing and drawing weed out the edge cases pretty effectively and I can better cut the question into pieces in that way. I also found that if I can't sort out my thoughts in written forms, there is no way for the code to work. Somehow it's a lot easier to setup mental barriers (to focus or to reduce problems into pieces) when I'm writing.

dahfizz 5y ago

I wish they would do studies like this with children / teenagers. In an adult, handwriting is going to be ingrained in their brain because they have been doing it their whole life. It is a part of the language processing their brain does, and it makes sense that tapping in to that helps their brain learn faster. I want to see if the same is true for children who type way more than they handwrite. Is there something innately better about handwriting, or is it just that the brain learns better using ingrained methods?

asciimov 5y ago
> I wish they would do studies like this with children / teenagers. They have. I don't have said studies in front of me. But the gist of it seems to be that typing is a quicker lower process skill (pushing a button), where as handwriting is a slower higher intensive process, (thinking about the letters you write). My opinion is that physical note taking, when not transcribing, requires you to process the information you are given, then summarizing it in your own words. With the benefit of handwriting being that you have more time to process the information.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I'm not sure there are much variety. For context, there is long debate between schools/parents who think keeping handwriting at school is a waste of time, and those who argue it is primordial to learning. And it's not just theoretical, some schools are really pushing hard one direction or the other. While I don't completely agree with the first camp, most studies done by the second camp are focused on how copying stuff during lectures brings better retention when handwritten compared to typed. My issue with that view is that copying lectures on a computer is mildly stupid in the first place. Why don't they share the slides and text and let the students focus on hearing and understanding the lecture instead ? Ideally they don't need any notes except for future reference on numbers, names or formulas. Students should be typing to produce content on their own, not to transcribe speeches. If learning has to happen on computers, IMO it needs to be done differently and not just an ersatz of what we were doing with pen, paper and blackboards. That reflection is already happening in some way, it just has nothing to do with the political fights around removing hand writing from school.

voisin 5y ago

I wonder if the writing confers the same benefits where the characters are the same as the learner’s native language. Here they used Arabic and so I wonder if there is something to the learners connecting writing new characters to new words/syntax/etc, versus if the characters had been the same.

sheer_audacity 5y ago
Letters change shape depending on where they are in the word, so almost certainly! :)

MAGZine 5y ago

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 text. Writing... is not that. Yes, you can rush. But it's slower, and I find that it helps me stay on single lines of thought. There's no manic jumping around, edit here, edit there. You can write the words, slowly even, and ruminate in their meaning. Computers are unparalleled for editing, but I just don't find it as good of a medium for creating things that require large spurts of unbroken thought. And it's not that you CAN'T produce good, creative, well-thought through things behind a keyboard (we all do it to some extent every day), it's just not _as good_ of a medium for it.

ozzythecat 5y ago
> Writing... is not that. Yes, you can rush. But it's slower, and I find that it helps me stay on single lines of thought. There's no manic jumping around, edit here, edit there. You can write the words, slowly even, and ruminate in their meaning. I really like what you’ve said here. This rings true for me as well. For years I was on a hunt for a better note taking app. I tried everything from a basic Mac notes app to Sublime Text to more niche tools like Omnifocus. Every time I ended up writing out the most critical notes by hand in a spiral notebook because it was more effective for me personally to retain that information.
gowld 5y ago
OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example), handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
- cguess 5y ago
  Learn some form of shorthand, and learn how to summarize on the go. Writing down word-for-word what a professor is saying is not going to work well. For that, bring a tape recorder (or an iPhone if you want to kill your battery) and retake your notes later when you can pause, rewind, etc.

unlikelymordant 5y ago

If handwriting is better than typing, is there some other way of representing words that is better than handwriting? Perhaps other than speaking? Is it just because these are the first methods we learn to represent language? Or is it because there are more degrees of freedom in handwriting, i.e. more ways of getting things wrong so you have to focus a lot more.

musingsole 5y ago
It doesn't transfer as easily to other people but mindmaps or lukasa (for an ancient predecessor) are infinitely information dense and naturally built to the particularities of their builder's mind.

sheer_audacity 5y ago

Interesting they used Arabic for this example - I grew up learning it at school but it’s only recently that smartphone keyboards are good enough to implement abjad. Most of the time you used to just switch to arabizi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet Writing in Arabic is really fun as well, calligraphy is appreciated.

karmakaze 5y ago

I certainly feel the same way about remember ideas in diagrams. A napkin/notebook drawing is so much better than using a design tool with a mouse.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

I feel like the needing to forget your base keymap would make learning with a keyboard much harder. A made up example if I saw the new letter for "s", I'd tell myself it's located where "k" is and then I'd be confused if it was k or s when I saw it.

Nadya 5y ago

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 vocabulary learning I have a journal where I write them instead. I'd say I learn words and kanji more quickly ever since I made that change. So while the study was for Arabic, and from scratch, my experience is from Japanese and roughly 1 - 1.5 years into learning (so wasn't a novice/from scratch at that point).

viraptor 5y ago
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.

gowld 5y ago

Same for taking notes when listening to a lecture or reading a book.

fouric 5y ago

This article, my personal experience, what I've heard from my friends, and the other evidence I've heard of all seem to support the same thing: that writing things by hand leads to better retention than typing. This seems to be the input-level dual of the meme that reading from physical paper leads to greater retention than from a computer screen. I'm curious as to what the cause could be for this one, as it seems less intuitive than the writing case. Back to writing: I've found that while writing things down, I'm often "bandwidth-limited" - not only can I not write nearly as fast as I can think, but I often run into this limit on a practical level, where I continually have a "buffer" of sentences that I want to write and I'm just waiting for my fingers to put them down on paper. Perhaps learning shorthand would allow me both bandwidth and retention?

rpastuszak 5y ago
>This seems to be the input-level dual of the meme that reading from physical paper leads to greater retention than from a computer screen. I'm curious as to what the cause could be for this one, as it seems less intuitive than the writing case. One of the possible reasons would be that we consume text content on paper differently than on the screen. Another reason would be that when you read text on paper you engage with a unique physical object. Engaging multiple senses and adding more cues/anchors helps with creating stronger connections in your brain and improves memory retention. That's also probably why writing things down with a pen helps you remember more and for longer--more parts of your brain are involved in the process of note taking.
bobthechef 5y ago
The physical act of writing engages the brain more than typing on a keyboard does. I claim that the physical motion and having to form shapes, as well as the more tangible spatial procession of your physical movement across the page reinforces the memory through association in a way that just pushing a key does not. Your hand is very intimately involved in making those marks on paper. Pushing buttons causes things to appear on a screen, but there is little tactile engagement and it isn't very differentiated (all pushes of a key are approximately the same). Writing is also more deliberate, whereas you can type while half asleep. The quality of your writing also depends on effort. Typed letters appear the same no matter how you press the key. You are mainly concerned about pushing the correct key, but how to press it is unimportant and there isn't much room for variation anyway.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> "The question out there for parents and educators is why should our kids spend any time doing handwriting," says cognitive scientist Brenda Rapp from Johns Hopkins University. On one side, more data is better, whatever the subject is (42 volunteer subjects though, and at no point in the abstract it’s explained how they sampled them). One the other hand, it looks like yet another of these studies, that has a very clear agenda, with a very small sample, completely focused on a single issue. If at least it was adressing it directly and focused on kids at school, but here it’s still a small proxy supposed to represent a bigger trend.

kstrauser 5y ago

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 trying.) Instead, I'm stuck in the second rate world of typing my notes like a peasant, shackled with vast tooling that lets me selectively encrypt sensitive parts, sync them across all my devices, instantly search through everything, turn notes into reminders with a tap of a button, and otherwise just barely scrape by. I get it. I'm cheating myself by not scribbling my thoughts onto a dead tree (or a Remarkable, etc.). I'm OK with that.

slowmovintarget 5y ago
Gives side-eye in fountain pen. I really do prefer fountain pen on nice paper, but there are times where you just need software.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  There's a Lamy Safari sitting next to me, on top of a Rhodia Webnotebook. If there's a gun to my head and I have to handwrite something, it's far and away my favorite tool. It's the least painful of everything I've tried.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 5y ago
Followup: I realize I'm replying more to other comments in this HN thread about handwriting notes being superior to typing them, which isn't at all what the article's about. The article said handwriting is better for learning a language, and that seems to intuitively make sense. It didn't talk about note taking in general.
dhosek 5y ago
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 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 --- 1. https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ 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.

momirlan 5y ago

I'm pretty sure Arabic is a special case for a person using the Latin alphabet. Would it be true for trying to learn another language using the same alphabet ? That is not tested in the article.

twirligigue 5y ago

Is this because we learnt to write before we learnt to type?

raegis 5y ago
This is a great question.

zihotki 5y ago

I wonder if the same experience can be applied to other languages. That's because in the experiment the subjects were learning another language with completely different alphabet from English. The study was done, I assume, in US since the university is located there. It for sure will apply when learning Mandarin or Katakana. But will it apply when learning a language from same language family like Dutch? From my personal experience if the alphabet is known for you then there is no need to write by hand. Typing could be even more efficient if you're typing fast. That makes it easy to quickly go through a lot of excercises for writing. And fast reading and reading a lot are another important factors to the success.

axiosgunnar 5y ago

(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.

TKZZ 5y ago
Maybe in the short term, and to learn the basics/conversational Chinese, however I believe in order to fully and best understand the writing system it's still best to learn how to write the characters. Plus, the deliberate act of creating the characters stroke-by-stroke seems to better implant them in my brain more than just typing out some pinyin, but maybe that's just me. Spending 5-10 minutes writing a character helps me remember the meaning and shape of it much better than an hour doing pinyin/duolingo esque practice. But I still probably can never see myself memorizing some of the more complex characters that even native Chinese folks have problems with :P
bobthechef 5y ago
> Typing Chinese is so much faster and easier than writing by hand. 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.
claudiawerner 5y ago
I'm learning Japanese, and I'm learning the kanji using Heisig's Remembering The Kanji method. I combine that with flashcards on Anki on my PC. When it shows a keyword card, I'll write out the character on paper or I'll trace it in the air with my finger, then check if I got it right. That works surprisingly well to memorize them. 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.

mleonhard 5y ago

Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797621993111 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797621993111

axaxs 5y ago

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

Ensorceled 5y ago
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.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  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.
Olreich 5y ago
I wonder if this has to do with how fast typing is. Is there similarly diminished learning in very slow typers? Does a shorthand expert fail to learn as much?
jeofken 5y ago
This is an original thought to me. I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed rather than handwritten.
elliekelly 5y ago
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 use it all the time and I couldn’t tell you if I’m hitting control or command or option because the underlying inputs don’t really matter. I only need to know the pattern my fingers are supposed to make and so that’s all that gets committed to memory.

frazbin 5y ago

As somebody who has congenitally shitty handwriting and usually ignores advice to pick up a pencil: it's still helpful when learning a new language. In fact, my natural crappiness becomes helpful because I have to be incredibly mindful in the act of writing to wind up with anything legible.

crackercrews 5y ago

I wonder if the benefit of handwriting is diminished if the student is using a tablet that converts each handwritten word into text as it is written? Is the benefit just in the act of writing? Does the act of seeing your own handwritten text on a page/screen reinforce the learning?

alecakin 5y ago
I wonder this too - I know that I learn much more rapidly and the knowledge "sticks" when I handwrite notes but just anecdotally, I feel like the effect is "lessened" when I handwrite digital notes.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I know for me, writing on a page forces me to commit to a spacial organization for the information— partitioning it into lists, leaving blank lines where I think there's going to be more to add, drawing arrows and connections and so on. Digital notes don't have any of those constraints, so I don't have to be nearly as disciplined about it. But counterintuitively, this doesn't generally lead to me going back and "cleaning up" my digital notes into a properly organized reference; instead it just stays a garbled mess. Kind of like how I can't do cardio as its own activity, but I'll happily commit to an 8km year round bike commute. I can only get the benefit when it's a forced side effect of something else.

kansface 5y ago

> N=42 This is noise.

p_j_w 5y ago
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.
FabHK 5y ago
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 p<0.05). They might well have done the maths and might have highly significant p-values. Note the supplementary materials [1]. I don't understand them without the paper, but they sure do have a lot of "*** p < 0.001" results. (Entirely unrelated side note: A shame that Sci-Hub currently does not add papers due to litigation...) [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797621993111 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0956797621993...
NotSwift 5y ago
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_the_Galaxy 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.

alexpetralia 5y ago

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 handwriting forces you to understand - then I have also have an alternative which includes typing. That is, "take notes twice." I always have a transcribed set of notes (anything which could possibly be relevant), and then a "curated" set which compresses the relevant and tosses the irrelevant. Yes, it takes more effort; yes, it takes more time. That is the cost of understanding. Personally I've found this to work better for me than handwriting.

baby 5y ago
I wish the same would exist for reading. One sentence at a time.
mackrevinack 5y ago
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

whalesalad 5y ago

I have better results with handwritten note-taking during dev work than digital. I have a pile of multicolored spiral bound notebooks on my desk that I use for clients/projects. Save a few pages in the beginning of each book for misc/table of contents.

SimianLogic2 5y ago

I learn by taking notes. I have notebooks full of notes... but I don't ever actually refer back to them. Just the act of writing things down helps me remember things.

user3939382 5y ago

I’ll look up the links if anyone’s interested, but FYI this is just the latest in a string of studies that have produced similar results.

nemo44x 5y ago

I'd say this is true for learning anything. Taking hand-written notes has always led to better recall for me than typing notes.

emodendroket 5y ago

Matches my experience learning foreign languages: nobody likes writing words over and over, exactly, but I cannot think of a more effective way to learn them.

psychomugs 5y ago

Technology extends but also amputates. See character amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

evv555 5y ago

When 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.

smoe 5y ago

When 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.

cromwellian 5y ago

This 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.

HKH2 5y ago
The other extreme, like at my university, is to drill writing everything (and cover less-interesting topics like telling the time, and almost useless words like '雙胞胎' - how many twins are there in China, Confucius Institute?!) I suspect most of your problem comes from trying to read isolated characters.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  No, actually I can't recognize most characters isolated unless they appear in a sentence. You can see the same issue with writing code. I can read 10 books on writing Rust code, but until I actually undertake some projects and write some real code in an unforgiving environment, I'm not gonna learn as well. The issue with writing characters isn't writing individual characters. It's writing whole sentences, and then facing the inevitable error feedback from others. I get this with Pinyin too because Pinyin autocomplete often inserts the wrong character and I don't notice until it's too late, but that's just it: pinyin autocomplete kind of promotes laziness. 90% of the time it's correct, and so I don't spend a lot of time proof reading it. I have just found hand-writing slows everything down and the muscle memory aids in remembering.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    Lets just end this on a positive note, I can't argue with anyone who is a fellow M.U.L.E. lover. :)
    - HKH2 5y ago
      Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

Well this does not bode well if I get back to learning Taiwanese Mandarin :|

roody15 5y ago

Handwriting notes is better when studying for a test…. study according to myself finds

nvader 5y ago

Will it replicate?

retsibsi 5y ago

The 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 any potential benefits beyond this very early, low-level learning. Learning higher-level features of the language (and even growing your vocabulary, once you've got past the point where letter shapes are a stumbling block) could just as easily be slowed down by handwriting, for the same reasons that it apparently helps in the complete beginner phase -- it forces you to slow down and expend more effort on the low-level task of letter formation.

GolDDranks 5y ago
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.
- NotSwift 5y ago
  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.
zarzavat 5y ago
This is exactly true from my experience. When you learn an new writing system, seemingly insignificant differences can have a big impact, and writing by hand forces you to confront them. Consider in Latin the difference between an I and an l, if you have never seen the latin alphabet before this might be quite confusing. Many writing systems have much more subtle differences than this, especially in cursive forms. e.g. if you use a keyboard you will never learn that م and ه are easily confused in Arabic if you don't write them properly. When learning vocabulary you want to focus on throughput. In the long term it does not really matter if you get a letter wrong here or there, it will correct with enough exposure and practice. The important thing is to do as many drills as possible with your chosen space repetition tool. A keyboard is a better tool than a pen for that.

Tainnor 5y ago

The title of this article should really read "Handwriting may be better than typing when learning the Arabic alphabet, underpowered study with n=42 finds". Science reporting really needs to start doing better.

danans 5y ago

Of the six languages I have studied (including Arabic as described in the article), not one of the programs have included using a keyboard, but then again I studied the last of these well over a decade ago. I am surprised keyboards would be used, especially for a language like Arabic whose writing system is inherently "cursive" and pretty deeply tied to the language's cultural identity. Is computer keyboard based language learning actually a significant thing these days?

mistyvales 5y ago

100% agree. It takes more effort for me to write things out and learning a language with repetitive writing works for me so much better.

polynomial 5y ago

Handwriting may be "better" but typing may turn out to be adequate –if current trends are any indication.

fogihujy 5y ago

I 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.

NotSwift 5y ago

I 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.

NotSwift 5y ago

In 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.

physicsguy 5y ago

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.

makeitdouble 5y ago
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.
- physicsguy 5y ago
  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.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    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.