[HN Gopher] Handwriting is better than typing when learning a ne...
___________________________________________________________________
Handwriting is better than typing when learning a new language,
study finds
Author : lnyan
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-07-12 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencealert.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencealert.com)
| momirlan wrote:
| 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.
| frazbin wrote:
| 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.
| cromwellian wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I wish the same would exist for reading. One sentence at a
| time.
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Nadya wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MAGZine wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| OTOH, of you do need to keep up (with a lecture, for example),
| handwriting hurts because you don't have time to finish.
| [deleted]
| stevesimmons wrote:
| This will get easier if you summarise the main points, write
| quicker (a skill you can practice), and do it with minimal
| looking down at your page.
| rmetzler wrote:
| 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.
| DelightOne wrote:
| How do you summarize when you don't know what the main and
| what the probably unimportant point is?
| cguess wrote:
| 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.
| zihotki wrote:
| 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?
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > 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.
| evv555 wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| Same for taking notes when listening to a lecture or reading a
| book.
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| (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.
| FabHK wrote:
| 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.
|
| (n=1, too)
| clarle wrote:
| I'm a second-generation Chinese-American who learned my first
| ~200 Chinese characters by handwriting and then everything else
| from the internet.
|
| 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.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| passivate wrote:
| 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.
| TKZZ wrote:
| 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
| voisin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Letters change shape depending on where they are in the word,
| so almost certainly! :)
| mleonhard wrote:
| Original paper: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797621993111
| nemo44x wrote:
| I'd say this is true for learning anything. Taking hand-written
| notes has always led to better recall for me than typing notes.
| kansface wrote:
| > N=42
|
| This is noise.
| p_j_w wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/10.1177/0956797621993...
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| smoe wrote:
| 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.
| sheer_audacity wrote:
| 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.
| twirligigue wrote:
| Is this because we learnt to write before we learnt to type?
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| fouric wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| psychomugs wrote:
| Technology extends but also amputates. See character amnesia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
| zihotki wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > "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.
| axaxs wrote:
| 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.
| jeofken wrote:
| This is an original thought to me.
|
| I wonder how grammar evolves now that most language is typed
| rather than handwritten.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| elliekelly wrote:
| 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.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Excellent insight. Thank you.
|
| 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.
| wenc wrote:
| That's a neat observation.
|
| 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").
| Olreich wrote:
| 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?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Well this does not bode well if I get back to learning Taiwanese
| Mandarin :|
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| I know what you mean about writing causing pain in the hands
| and wrists...
|
| Have you ever tried cursive? I can write much longer and with
| less pain when using cursive - really night and day.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Have you ever tried cursive?
|
| Isn't that what people over 6yo use? I can't tell if I
| misunderstood the question or just experienced some serious
| culture shock...
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| So people just write in block letters instead?
| csa wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Schools stopped teaching it (even many "good" schools).
| People largely don't use it except for signatures.
|
| I personally switched to block letters a long time ago
| because I can't read my own cursive when I am writing
| quickly. My penmanship sucks.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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.
| aspyct wrote:
| 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.
| dahfizz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
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