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.

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'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.

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

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)

> 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 agree that copying characters in Chinese made my hand hurt, and I didn't internalise any of the meanings.

https://pingtype.github.io/docs/failed.html#copyingCharacter...

Reading parallel text processed with Pingtype was far more useful for me.