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.
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.
> 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.
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.
And then you still will spread your focus. You'll have to summarize in paralel with trying to understand a professor. That doesn't work well and very tiresome.
Why not to watch a recording of a lecture in the first place and pause when you need to think?
I was and am always too lazy to go back after the recording. But I found that for me, my half-learned dialect of Teeline shorthand is enough for me to keep up with speakers...when they are not speaking especially fast. I'd speed up more if I got used to cutting out vowels and doing phonetic spellings and brief forms like the Teeline Fast book says to do, but like the sibling comment says, that can slow me down even more as I try to figure out what is being said -> how to make it phonetic -> oh crap he's moved on, lets jump back to the newest offset.
I'd do Gregg shorthand but with my handwriting being so poor as is and the apparent risk that the writing can be ambiguous later, I went with a phonetic shorthand. Works for my 'threat model', write it down now, review now or in 10 years and you can translate it back.
There are also lots of techniques to turn notes on paper into something else than a stream of words. For example you could create mind maps, tables, diagrams.
From my personal experience I also found I remembered hand written notes much better than notes I took on the laptop. While learning for tests at university I made it a point to write down the most important points from handouts into s ring book in order to better memorize the content.
It normally takes me about 2-3 hours to get through a one-hour online lecture. But I actually do get through them. As an undergrad, with in-person lectures, I learnt maybe 50% of the content with a good lecturer. 30% with a bad one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Writing in Arabic is really fun as well, calligraphy is appreciated.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. Returning to my notes is the most important thing I do.
I just don't have enough space in my working memory for all the content we go through per day, all the different topics. It's fine if you handle a thing or two, but a totally different topic if you're jumping around meeting after meeting.
You seem to be heavily focusing on your own memory and how taking the notes impacts you, when others (me at least) need notes mostly for future reference.
I’m not trying to remember in 20 years what order I need to deploy code. I won’t care in two weeks about my TODO of the week.
I don’t even _want_ to be aware of the log extracts and where they are stored in the folders and what we discussed about them, hopefully nothing happens and we can all forget.
Note taking as an adult is fundamentally different to me from the note taking I did as a kid who was supposed to pass tests with nothing more than a pen on the table.
I'm in the U.S. and I learned cursive about that age. I'm 30 now, and the only thing I write in cursive these days is my signature (which for the record looks awful). I'm fairly certain cursive is no longer taught in public schools in my area.
A 5 page essay probably wouldn't be written by hand (to make sure everyone wrote a consistent 5 pages), but in-person tests certainly are. In college/high school I remember having to write 2 essays in two hours long-hand for multiple tests in the last decade. We just use block letters.
People in my generation find cursive illegible and clumsy, but with practice writing block letters can be plenty fast.
> 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).
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
I find though that it's impossible to read cursive (hand-written) Chinese unless you've written a lot yourself (with the correct stroke order). Read printed Chinese and type using pinyin, sure. Read hand-written Chinese - no way.
Heh, its just a paper reporting results that they found. There is nothing really to disagree, as it is not an opinion. I think science reporting should provide this context rather than produce some kind of headline that is treated as The Truth :)
Anyway, when I was trying to learn French, I found that for myself no single method worked. I learnt by reading, listening, writing, conversing, singing some random french song, etc. My belief is that learning is multimodal, and there is support for this view in literature. I think these types of studies are still valuable as they control for one variable and provide some insight on that. I'm sure we will slowly converge on the learning model most likely to promote long term retention.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Each handwritten letter requires distinct motor skills (manipulating pen angles, pressure etc.), whereas each keyboard-typed letter requires a much smaller set of nearly identical motor skills (just a "tap").
It goes beyond that, I think. As you're planning what to write, you come up with shorthand because it's hard to keep up with a speaker by hand. Summarizing requires much more active listening, analysis, and synthesis. There's a lot more going on in your brain than when typing.
Since listening to a Lex Fridman podcast on how one hemisphere of the brain is more devoted to language than the other, I've been thinking about just how complex language is. I've never agreed with some linguists like Chomsky that speak about language as necessary for thought, mostly because my own mental language is far more physical and symbolic than linguistic. At one point in my life, for example, I was able to look at construction drawings and point to the weakest part of a structural system. That's not my brain using language. That's something else.
That said, something that just occurred to me after reading your comment is this: Over time we're having to translate this communication thing into different arenas. My fingers have memorized how to type most words. I wouldn't be able to type as fast as I do if they didn't. My eyes and brain have obviously memorized words at a glance. My ears have memorized words in person, which sound different than they do from a computer or television. They've also memorized the sound of words from 0.5x speed to 3x speed because of all the podcasts I listen to.
I guess where I'm going with this is that we're putting larger and larger demands on our brains. The, oh what to call it, increasing dimensionality of communication? That, whatever that is, it feels so mentally taxing and I can't imagine that is ever going away. If anything it will continue to increase as societies and technologies get more complex.
In college I used to handwrite out all my notes and prepare cheat sheets for tests but I would never refer back to them. Just the action of writing them out helped me to remember things much better than my normally lousy memory.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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
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.
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.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadKeyboards 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 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.
Why not to watch a recording of a lecture in the first place and pause when you need to think?
I'd do Gregg shorthand but with my handwriting being so poor as is and the apparent risk that the writing can be ambiguous later, I went with a phonetic shorthand. Works for my 'threat model', write it down now, review now or in 10 years and you can translate it back.
From my personal experience I also found I remembered hand written notes much better than notes I took on the laptop. While learning for tests at university I made it a point to write down the most important points from handouts into s ring book in order to better memorize the content.
Well worth the change.
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 in Arabic is really fun as well, calligraphy is appreciated.
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).
Practicing writing, even with apps made for that purpose helped a lot.
Somehow it's a lot easier to setup mental barriers (to focus or to reduce problems into pieces) when I'm writing.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
I really do prefer fountain pen on nice paper, but there are times where you just need software.
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.
Anecdata: As part of an ongoing project,¹ I spent about two years teaching myself Biblical Greek. As part of this project, I ended up filling a couple notebooks with handwritten notes—writing out tables of conjugations for every verb that was taught, handwriting translations to and from Greek, etc. What I found was that even though I never actually went back to the previous notes, I had good recall of the information that I practiced in this fashion. I think (but what do I know?) that part of it was the spatial component to the note-taking. I can't find stuff in code that I've written without searching,² but I could go back to my handwritten notes from learning Greek (2017–2019) and find, say, what I had written about the aorist passive without much difficulty.³
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1. https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/
2. You might think, “big deal—then search” but what if the search is not by some thing easily turned into text but rather some concept which I don't remember exactly what I typed to do it, or the searchable thing ends up being some bit of text that recurs so frequently that the search is effectively useless. I have a much easier time finding things I've read on paper from my personal library of around 1200 printed books than I do finding something I've read online even with the fast searching capabilities of the internet (although I will admit that it's a lot easier to find disposable writing again online than in print).
3. That spatial context helps in other ways too—I can find things from grad school notes (2002–6) pretty easily as well and there was one time in 1999 that I pulled up a quote from a book that I'd read in 1992 (which had no index) in just a couple minutes thanks to my memory of roughly where in the book and where on a page spread the passage appeared.⁴
4. Yes, I know that, especially with that last anecdote that I'm getting into stuff that's likely well outside the norm, but the basic point that spatial context helps with memory is something that's well-studied and documented. We don't get that with typing on a screen.
I just don't have enough space in my working memory for all the content we go through per day, all the different topics. It's fine if you handle a thing or two, but a totally different topic if you're jumping around meeting after meeting.
I'd expect if you're at the meeting, you've probably learnt something of value. Otherwise I'd just invite the notebook.
I’m not trying to remember in 20 years what order I need to deploy code. I won’t care in two weeks about my TODO of the week.
I don’t even _want_ to be aware of the log extracts and where they are stored in the folders and what we discussed about them, hopefully nothing happens and we can all forget.
Note taking as an adult is fundamentally different to me from the note taking I did as a kid who was supposed to pass tests with nothing more than a pen on the table.
Have you ever tried cursive? I can write much longer and with less pain when using cursive - really night and day.
Isn't that what people over 6yo use? I can't tell if I misunderstood the question or just experienced some serious culture shock...
Schools stopped teaching it (even many “good” schools). People largely don’t use it except for signatures.
I personally switched to block letters a long time ago because I can’t read my own cursive when I am writing quickly. My penmanship sucks.
Wow. Do kids not have hand written assignments anymore? I can't even imagine having to write out, say a 5 page essay, in block letters by hand.
Both went to good Catholic schools in the Midwest. Neither had to learn cursive.
They say that they haven’t hand written assignments for many years. My niece, a university student, doesn't even know what “blue books” are.
People in my generation find cursive illegible and clumsy, but with practice writing block letters can be plenty fast.
Alabama
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Delaware
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Illinois
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Louisiana
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Massachussets
Mississippi
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Ohio
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https://mycursive.com/the-14-states-that-require-cursive-wri...
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).
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.
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.
But I still probably can never see myself memorizing some of the more complex characters that even native Chinese folks have problems with :P
The article is talking about how learning is facilitated by handwriting in a way that typing does not, and not about which results in more quickly produced text. (Also, it should be clear that how well you know the language will also put a bound on how fast you type.)
None of this is news. I've had teachers tell me this years ago. Writing engages the brain in a way that typing keys does not. That a study corroborates this claim is not surprising to me.
That said, the memory pathway should work for reading and writing, that is, recognition and production. I need a further skillset (pronunciation) in order to do that production on a computer, since being able to write individual characters by hand without any knowledge of the words or pronunciation isn't very useful.
I have no idea how to handwrite half the characters I can recognize, read, and "write" now thanks to typing with a Pinyin or Jyutping keyboard.
(n=1, too)
Anyway, when I was trying to learn French, I found that for myself no single method worked. I learnt by reading, listening, writing, conversing, singing some random french song, etc. My belief is that learning is multimodal, and there is support for this view in literature. I think these types of studies are still valuable as they control for one variable and provide some insight on that. I'm sure we will slowly converge on the learning model most likely to promote long term retention.
https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html#copyingCharacter...
Reading parallel text processed with Pingtype was far more useful for me.
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 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.
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.
I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed rather than handwritten.
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.
Each handwritten letter requires distinct motor skills (manipulating pen angles, pressure etc.), whereas each keyboard-typed letter requires a much smaller set of nearly identical motor skills (just a "tap").
Since listening to a Lex Fridman podcast on how one hemisphere of the brain is more devoted to language than the other, I've been thinking about just how complex language is. I've never agreed with some linguists like Chomsky that speak about language as necessary for thought, mostly because my own mental language is far more physical and symbolic than linguistic. At one point in my life, for example, I was able to look at construction drawings and point to the weakest part of a structural system. That's not my brain using language. That's something else.
That said, something that just occurred to me after reading your comment is this: Over time we're having to translate this communication thing into different arenas. My fingers have memorized how to type most words. I wouldn't be able to type as fast as I do if they didn't. My eyes and brain have obviously memorized words at a glance. My ears have memorized words in person, which sound different than they do from a computer or television. They've also memorized the sound of words from 0.5x speed to 3x speed because of all the podcasts I listen to.
I guess where I'm going with this is that we're putting larger and larger demands on our brains. The, oh what to call it, increasing dimensionality of communication? That, whatever that is, it feels so mentally taxing and I can't imagine that is ever going away. If anything it will continue to increase as societies and technologies get more complex.
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.
This is noise.
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.
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/10.1177/0956797621993...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
PS: I get it that some people will down-vote this because jokes like this do not really stimulate an intellectual discussion. But reading something by Douglas Adams is a really good idea.
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.