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Comment by retsibsi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

If you want to be able to read a language you must be familiar with the script that it is written with. Some languages do not even have a notion of letters. In Japanese a basic notion is the Kanji (and there are really many of them). There is no way to pronounce an individual Kanji because its interpretation depends on the Kanji around it.

In the end, this really depends on what you call "Learning languages", learning to speak and understand others might be far easier that learning to read and write that language.

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.

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