I took one class in college and didn’t end up really liking Russian - didn’t know it was a gendered language beforehand and I really dislike that, mostly because I’m lazy. Before taking the class, Russian cursive seemed absolutely illegible, but I got pretty good at reading and writing it afterwards.

However, I always thought it was weird we were only allowed to write in cursive in the class, where in English or other languages it’s more of stylistic option. Our teacher told us everyone wrote like that and it was considered childish to write block letters instead, but she also told us everyone should read Gulag Archipelgo and that Solzhenitsyn was a great author. Was she right about the writing in cursive part though?

(Don’t think this is appropriate for language learning since I’m not really asking for the sake of learning the language, so I posted in chat instead)

  • Łumało [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
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    2 months ago

    I mean in Poland I was never taught to write in block letters. Cursive was the way we were taught, it was just writing.

    When I was learning about American literacy for the first time and first discovered the “block/cursive” division was like “wtf why” and “lmao backward americans”.

    It might be similar to how it is in Russia idk ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

    • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      i’ve seen a few russians write and i’ve never seen anything but cursive. hell, i never saw anyone use block letters until i went to the US.

      this whole thing smells of anglo brain to me.

  • anarcho_blinkenist [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I’ve never seen real hand-written Russian that wasn’t in cursive (barring my own, very childish writing, which sloppily mixes the two forms). A lot of articles online I read will have quotes written in typed-cursive too.

    Since it’s not a native language I hate it (the struggle of it for me). T lookin like cyrillic M and both also running together with Л, И lookin like a latin U and running together with Ш, … Ранит мой мозг

    It also stress markers are only ever written in beginner material. Since there’s vowel shortening with stress and the stress can change the meaning of the word (писать или писать, to write or to piss?), you just always must check when coming across new words in text. I’ve even had Russian-English dictionaries that don’t have stress markers.

    And don’t get me started on people dropping the umlaut that differentiates ё е (yo, ye).

    • starkillerfish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      If I were to reform Russian right now I would make stress markers obligatory (in addition to improving gendering). It would make it so much easier to learn, even though maybe it’ll look a bit cluttered.

  • CarmineCatboy2 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Don’t know about Russian, but in Brazil we are taught cursive first in pre-school and primary school. Then in middle school we are taught block writing specifically for the purpose of filling forms. In practice most people just write a mixed version of cursive and block depending on how quickly they need to write everything.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      In Australia, we were taught block, print, then cursive. In engineering we were taught block again.

      My teachers were very angry with my writing

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    I work with a Ukrainian guy and he writes English in immaculate cursive. Idk how that translates to Cyrillic but I’d assume it does which probably means he’s well practiced with it.

    • starkillerfish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Even in high school some teachers wouldnt say anything if it wasnt written in cursive. I think it is getting sort of phased out by the younger generations.