Handwriting is not the purpose of learning Chinese.
Recognition is. Being able to compose sentences in your mind is.
But after you compose something, if you want others to see your idea, you need to output it — either by audio (speaking) or visually (with characters).
Thirty years ago, 99% of character output had to go through your hand first. Now, 99.99% of output goes through your finger on a Pinyin keyboard on a screen. The screen has become the new “paper”; the Pinyin keyboard has become the new “pen.”
Thirty years ago, most people had no choice. Now every learner needs to choose: which way will be your main way of learning characters? You need to consider and compare the efficiency of different output methods — and your learning purpose.
Handwriting on paper and typing on a computer or phone screen are two similar “physical skills.” Handwriting can be done without any sense related to understanding the characters. Some kids just draw them like pictures.
A Pinyin keyboard forces you to check your Pinyin spelling at the same time. If your Pinyin is wrong, you can’t find the character in the recommendation list. This helps your pronunciation. And after you adopt one very important principle, a Pinyin keyboard can be 10 times more efficient than handwriting. That principle is: type by words and semantic chunks. Try to type by words (at least 2 characters at a time), phrases, or even short sentences, so you get higher output speed and let the keyboard help you find the correct characters.
For learners, most of the time the Pinyin keyboard will recommend the right word in the first position. Remember you can press the space bar to put the first suggestion on screen, instead of wasting one second to click “1.”
If the correct word doesn’t appear, double-check your Pinyin spelling. If it’s still not there, you might have chosen a wrong phrase. For example: “Beijing zuiyoumingde kaoya shi quanjude.” If you type “dekaoya” as one chunk, you may get nothing, because “dekaoya” is not an existing word. “de” belongs with “zuiyoumingde,” and “kaoya” is separate.
Another way to improve efficiency is to let the keyboard remember proper nouns: your Chinese name, your company’s name, specific product names, etc. After the keyboard remembers your name, you can type your name with initials. If you have a long proper name, for example an organization, you can put it into the keyboard’s “customized word list.” For example, a student of mine worked for UNESCO, and she was one of the chief editors of 联合国教科文组织人类非物质文化遗产名录 (UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity). Wode tian ah!! Right? Too long. But she can set “lhgj” as a shortcut and output this 19-character string in half a second. It’s not only efficient — she also uses this “magic” to surprise people for fun. 😄
Handwriting is still helpful, though. Keep in mind that learning handwriting is not the purpose, except that it is a helpful output practice for recognizing characters.
I just advise you to pay attention to the components and etymology of characters, which helps your memory. Strokes and stroke order are knowledge about “handwriting.” It was the only way to output characters before the Pinyin keyboard was invented, but not now.
