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.
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.
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.
Anyone who has shown a kid an iPhone would know that touch screens are immensely more intuitive for kids. They can write words in days compared to months of rote handwriting practice. Of course the press around this study will be flawed. And of course this study didn’t have a control, like learning to play the violin or a similar motor skill.
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.
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.
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.
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?
fun thing, it's other way around for me. I hate writing, because I skip letters all the time, have to cross a letter or two to correct that mistake, and make a mess as a result. Not much practice for more than a decade, of course. I have no such problem when typing.
Additionally (and mainly?) a skill learnt as a young child - eg. handwriting - is presumably more likely to be fully absorbed and "foolproof" than one like typing which at least in former generations (so may not apply in your case) was learnt later (and often to a lesser competence) as a teenager or adult.
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
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.
I don't think the speed matters as much as that drawing words cements them more solidly in the mind than touching them. So more an imbalance in process difficulty than speed.
The same effect happens in note-taking. I almost never review my handwritten notes, but the act of writing them is probably why I don't have to review them. When I'm recalling information, I frequently remember where and how on the piece of paper I wrote it.
> 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.
iA Writer in typewriter focus mode is great for me this way. It encourages me to treat a document as append-only until I'm completely finished writing it.
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.
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
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.
> 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
I know that this is subjective, but I thought that this mattered, but ultimately it did not. I rarely (/never) refer back to my electronic notes but I do occasionally browse through my handwritten notes. The advanced features that you mentioned were cool to play with, but are a distraction from the main purpose of note taking.
For what it's worth, I can barely make reminder apps/TODO lists work for me, maybe I should try a hobonichi or something. (/me makes a note to buy one, which I will probably never get around to).
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] retsibsi|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zarzavat|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GolDDranks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] an_opabinia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axaxs|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Ensorceled|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Olreich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codesnik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeofken|4 years ago|reply
I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed rather than handwritten.
[+] [-] MAGZine|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
The same effect happens in note-taking. I almost never review my handwritten notes, but the act of writing them is probably why I don't have to review them. When I'm recalling information, I frequently remember where and how on the piece of paper I wrote it.
[+] [-] ozzythecat|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstrauser|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dhosek|4 years ago|reply
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/
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.
[+] [-] throwawaygal7|4 years ago|reply
Have you ever tried cursive? I can write much longer and with less pain when using cursive - really night and day.
[+] [-] isatty|4 years ago|reply
I know that this is subjective, but I thought that this mattered, but ultimately it did not. I rarely (/never) refer back to my electronic notes but I do occasionally browse through my handwritten notes. The advanced features that you mentioned were cool to play with, but are a distraction from the main purpose of note taking.
For what it's worth, I can barely make reminder apps/TODO lists work for me, maybe I should try a hobonichi or something. (/me makes a note to buy one, which I will probably never get around to).
[+] [-] kstrauser|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|4 years ago|reply
I really do prefer fountain pen on nice paper, but there are times where you just need software.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dahfizz|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crackercrews|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nadya|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
Practicing writing, even with apps made for that purpose helped a lot.
[+] [-] voisin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheer_audacity|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zihotki|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smoe|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alexpetralia|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mackrevinack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychomugs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tainnor|4 years ago|reply
Science reporting really needs to start doing better.
[+] [-] momirlan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unlikelymordant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bobthechef|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpastuszak|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physicsguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cromwellian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HKH2|4 years ago|reply
I suspect most of your problem comes from trying to read isolated characters.