Writing In The Air To Help You Remember Characters

[feihong]

I air-write quite a bit when I do my flashcards. But I prefer surfaces when they're available. My handwriting is still terrible but at least I know the strokes. I feel like I remember the characters a bit better when I also know how to write them.

[Scoobyqueen]

Feihong - Do you think the air writing helps in addition to writing with hand? I am thinking that it might be a double reinforcement. Have you noticed any difference?

[feihong]

There's a couple of slight differences. When writing out characters by hand with a pen, I have to be careful of proportions (for example, accidentally making complex characters way fatter than simpler characters). When air writing, I do visualize a piece of paper that I'm writing on, but I never imagine myself making proportion mistakes, and the characters in my head appear as if they were printed. Also, the finger gestures I use when air writing are way more exaggerated.

It might count as double reinforcement since the muscle memory of using a pen and waving a finger are similar but not equivalent.

[Scoobyqueen]

That is really useful Feihong. Thanks for sharing your experience. I will be doing the same and will be reporting back if I notice any reinforcment.

[Glenn]

This is interesting. Just the other day I was driving down the road with my girlfriend and saw a truck that say "U.S. Mail" on it, and thought of 郵便 (Japanese for 郵政), and that made me think about how 郵 is one of the characters I've never had much practice writing because it just doesn't come up all that much outside of mail, so I wrote it in the air. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her about how I've had problems with it and just thought of it so I wanted to write it to help me remember it.

I think the biggest difference between writing on paper and writing in the air is that you have unlimited space and you don't have much visual information to let you know how you're doing -- you have to imagine it all. I can still "see" it as I'm writing it, but it's not the same as seeing you've made one part too big, which is what feihong was talking about with the proportions. I think aside from muscle memory it may also help because you have to keep it all in your head, too, whereas when you're writing on paper you can look and see what you have so far, and that may help you get where you're going if you slip up, but if you're writing in air, the only record you have of what you've done is in your head, so you have to focus more on the shape/writing of the character. That's mostly a hunch, though.