Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

General discussion about learning languages

Do you write using cursive?

No, I do not.
20
27%
No, I do not (but I secretly wish that I could).
5
7%
No, I do not (but I wish that my children could).
1
1%
Yes, I do.
29
39%
Yes, I do and would like my children to learn the script too.
19
26%
 
Total votes: 74

Skynet
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Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby Skynet » Sun Mar 03, 2019 8:57 pm

I have been writing in cursive for over two decades, and it has been a mixed blessing to be honest. On one hand, I am complimented on my penmanship, and on the other, my professors struggle to read my handwriting. In Zimbabwe, using the script meant one of two things: you were either born immediately after WWII or went to a certain type of school, both of which start extremely uncomfortable conversations. Learning the script for me was compulsory, but my siblings did not learn it and do not use the script to this day.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to know how the script is faring in the Latin-alphabet world (spoiler: it's declining in the US) and was surprised to discover that the script is also used for the Cyrillic (credit to Assimil Russian Without Toil), Greek, Bengali and Chinese alphabets.

This list cannot possibly be exhaustive! I would like to invite the denizens of the forum to share their experiences with cursive, and for those who chose YES to state which alphabet(s) they use the script in, and if they would like their children to learn it.

EDIT: Spelling correction. Blame it on the desert sand. ;)
Last edited by Skynet on Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby Skynet » Sun Mar 03, 2019 8:58 pm

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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby lingua » Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:16 pm

I coudn't answer the poll because I write in a combination of cursive and print. It's not easily readable by anyone but myself. I rarely write these days outside of doing my grammar exercises. I tend to think there is no real reason to learn cursive writing for most people since they will likely never have need to use it.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby Speakeasy » Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:36 pm

@SkyNet, this has the makings for an interesting discussion. I would imagine that the majority of respondents will indicate that they “know HOW” to use the increasingly-obsolete writing implements (I believe they were once called pens and pencils, but I admit that my memory has been failing me lately), that they once relied on cursive for taking notes at school, at university and that like, that they occasionally resort to scribbling a few barely-legible lines on a grocery list but, beyond that, having entered the working world where computers and smartphones are the tools of choice for modern communications, they “lack the PRACTICE” of cursive writing in their native languages. There will probably be a few language-learners who practice cursive script in languages other than their own: in cases where their chosen L2’s scripts differ from that their own (Arabic, Russian, Chinese, et cetera).

My generation, born in the late forties and early fifties, spent hours-upon-hours practicing cursive writing during the first few years of elementary school. The goal was that every child’s handwriting should be as close-as-possible to the norm as presented by the public school system. Marks were deducted from all school or homework assignments, including those for classes in history, geography, mathematics, physics, and the like, for “sloppy” handwriting, whether it was legible or not (the system promoted, but never achieved, widespread uniformity in virtually every field imaginable). Of course, individuals developed their own stylistic variants of cursive writing which differed slightly from the proposed standard; however, on balance, the handwriting of most students was quite legible. A factor which reinforced “correct usage” was that most students did not have easy recourse to mechanical/electronic devices to replace the requirement to write with -- what were those things, again? – ah, yes, pens and pencils.

Like myself, most of my friends and acquaintances are over-the-hill and are hurtling with little grace down the other side. A matter which has become a surprise to many of us is that, having become so accustomed to using computers and smartphones over the past decade, for want of regular practice, our handwriting has declined quite noticeably. Then again, the reason for the generalized decline just might be entropy. :shock:

EDITED:
Typos. I wouldn't have made them had I written this post by hand ... I think.
Last edited by Speakeasy on Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:59 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby languist » Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:41 pm

I write exclusively in cursive and no other soul on the planet can understand my handwriting. What is really interesting is that my brother's handwriting looks extremely similar to mine, despite the fact that there's no way our writing could have influenced each other's. As for my children learning cursive, okay - go for it, but only if your teachers can read your elegant chickenscratch.

Some contextual information: I'm 24 years old, and a native resident of the UK. I taught myself cursive (badly, it seems) as a child because I liked how it looked and that's how I thought all writing was done, however the rest of my classmates learnt it in school a year or so later. We were all taught cursive, and were penalised for not writing in this style - and writing neatly and correctly. Suddenly, we were at "big school", where they no longer seemed to care what our handwriting looked like, and so some people stuck to curly cursive, and other abandoned it for bubbly print.

To answer the part about which language I use cursive in - it feels extremely natural for me in French and English. I also write this way in Spanish and Slovak, although it feels less intuitive. I want to write in Cyrillic cursive, because my Russian/Kabardian looks like it was written by an elephant fighting with a quill. Attempting in Arabic and Greek scripts seems like it would be necessary in the future, but really, my teachers used to ask me to type my essays (in my native alphabet!) on the computer because my writing was so small and twirly, so I'm not very optimistic about my chances here.
Last edited by languist on Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:53 pm

I use cursive in Latin alphabet languages (American D'Nealian, not French or German), Hebrew cursive for Hebrew and Yiddish but print mostly for Ladino and not Solitreo. I can't read any of the older Hebrew cursives. In fact, modern Hebrew cursive is doing quite well, to the point that almost all my teachers can't/won't write print.

For Tibetan, of the various scripts and variant, I'm only working with Uchen (a print script) for the moment and cannot read or write cursive Ume scripts (Zhuza or Bêcug) or others but I've had brief intros into each. Ume is definitely healthy. I've looked at older German, Polish and Russian cursives and find these interesting but unreadable.

For Syriac I spent some time studying Estrangela and Serto but alas, like for Arabic, I might as well not have studied at all because I forgot it all. I dropped these languages too early and won't be going back for at least a few years.

My daughters use principally French cursive (healthy, required in schools) and my oldest is looking into Persian for work but mostly works with Akkadian cuneiform -- which is to say, even if cursive disappears, there will always be someone like her digging it up and study it :lol:

I have a few books in Sütterlin (I think?), an old German cursive and I may sit down one day and try to decipher them. They are mostly writing exercises and poems of a young student.

Frankly, I have no nostalgia for Latin cursive, I'm left handed and it made me suffer terribly and I write terrible chicken scratches -- buh-bye! I would not have minded if my daughters only learned print but that isn't done in France, I like their writing.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby Stefan » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:03 pm

Similar to what Speakeasy said, everyone in Sweden is taught but few people use it.

It is said that Skolöverstyrelsen ruined the tradition in the 1970s by creating a new simplified writing system (SÖ-stilen) and forcing teachers to implement it. I was taught both which probably caused more confusion than it helped.

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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby dicentra8 » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:45 pm

I learned to write Latin alphabet in cursive during elementary school. Once I was no longer in elementary school I made the switch to something more similar to print writing. And now my handwriting looks like this (my notebook for Finnish was the one closest to me :P )

Image

So far, cursive writing is still taught during elementary school (Portugal). But usually the people who tend to stick with it are mostly older people. For example, my mother's handwriting is more similar to cursive, mine has nothing to do with it.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:48 pm

I'm also not sure how to respond in the poll, mainly because the answer is different for the main languages where I write things by hand - "Yes, I do" for Russian, "No, I do not" for English (the school where I first learned to write English was a bit unusual for the former Soviet Union in not teaching how to write Latin cursive) and "???" for Japanese. On the one hand I do generally try to write how most Japanese people write by hand and observe the differences from printed style, but on the other hand I don't have nearly enough experience writing Japanese to know of all the common shorthands, and on the other other hand the term "cursive" in relation to East Asian writing usually refers to a very specific style of writing which I believe is hardly ever used outside of artistic calligraphy these days. In general there might actually be a problem with asking this sort of question about all possible writing systems, because it's not obvious how to actually define what "cursive" even is across languages. Coming from a Russian background "cursive" generally means that all letters within one word are connected, with little to no lifting of the pen inside a word. So from a Russian perspective Hebrew cursive in its modern form doesn't seem cursive at all, whereas the Arabic script is cursive by default, even in its most angular forms.
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Re: Cursive: Going The Way Of The Dodo?

Postby Lianne » Sun Mar 03, 2019 11:38 pm

I CAN write in cursive, but I don't. For me, writing in cursive has always taken me longer than printing, which is funny since speed is allegedly one of the benefits of cursive. The only thing I really write in cursive these days is my signature (poorly), or maybe if I'm making a sign that's supposed to look fancy, lol.

I work in an elementary school, and kids here do still learn it (contrary to the what I often hear from handwringing adults), though I suspect they don't have to use it as much as I did in school.

As a genealogist, I do find being able to read it a useful skill. Even with that knowledge, deciphering a 300-year-old French church document can be tricky, but it would be impossible otherwise!
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