Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

General discussion about learning languages
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verdastelo
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby verdastelo » Wed Dec 07, 2022 1:11 pm

I prefer to write in all my languages because I love writing. Here's are a few samples from my notebooks.

Persian
Image

Sanskrit
Image

Chinese
Image

Russian
Image

French
Image

Kannada
Image
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby rdearman » Wed Dec 07, 2022 4:22 pm

I remembered I did a video about this ages ago!
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby Mahoutklight » Mon Dec 26, 2022 6:49 am

I dislike writing basically anything by hand. If you want to take something out or move it, you have to get rid of everything else after it and rewrite it or it looks odd. Also, erasing takes a so much time and a lot of times I accidentally erase things close to my mistake so I have to redo that too. Plus, writing hurts my hand and I have to stop every 5 minutes, and I accidentally smear my writing a lot.
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby louisianne » Tue Dec 27, 2022 1:20 pm

I intend to do a lot of handwriting journaling activity from January. I have already bought some notebooks, and I will be writing in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Russian. And I will be doing it by hand in order to practice cursive.
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Dec 27, 2022 4:05 pm

Mahoutklight wrote:Plus, writing hurts my hand and I have to stop every 5 minutes, and I accidentally smear my writing a lot.

This is caused by lack of 'penmanship'. I've seen a lot of younger people (I don't know how old you are) holding the pen strangely and too tight, causing hand cramping.

As you can see from the photos of verdastelo's notebooks above making corrections is not problematic and is even valuable as you get to see the mistake and the correction.
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby sfuqua » Tue Dec 27, 2022 6:29 pm

I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and when I was 10, I moved across the country and unfortunately moved into a new school district where they:
1. Took their cursive writing very seriously, and
2. Used a different style of cursive than I had been trained in.

I busted my butt learning the new system, and after a few months I could see that I had made a lot of progress.

Apparently, my teacher thought that I needed a little humiliation and at one point, in front of a visiting "handwriting specialist" had me stand up, come to the front of the class, and turn to face the class. My teacher told the "visiting expert" that my handwriting was terrible, and that I had a bad attitude about it. The "visiting expert" took a look at my handwriting. She announced that she could tell that I was a "lazy person" who would never amount to anything. My teacher added, "Anybody with handwriting like this has no pride in themselves was bound to be a failure." They went on like this for a while...

I remember thinking at the time, that I should just be quiet, that those teachers were crazy. I remember a couple of girls in the back of the room getting teary-eyed watching me get humiliated. The A-group, in the front of the room, just nodded and smiled because they enjoyed watching somebody get put down. I still remember every second of that time perfectly, 59 years later.

Their motivation had a big effect on me. I love the look of beautiful cursive, but I never spent another second in my life trying to improve my cursive writing. For the rest of that school year, I had a lot of difficulty doing anything. My pen never worked, and if the teacher tried it and told me that it did, I forgot which end of the pen the ink came out of and needed help. I needed a lot of help to do anything.

And that little motivational exercise changed my life, perhaps not as they intended. I became a teacher, and during my whole career, I never bullied a student or allowed a student to be bullied by another teacher in my presence.
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Re: Writing in your target language? By hand or Typing?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Dec 27, 2022 6:43 pm

That sort of thing used to be common, as well as forcing left-handed people to write with their right-hand. No-one used to get into trouble for not being able to draw, yet got stick for not being able to produce near-perfect handwriting. It was fading away when I was at school, but still existed.
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