Tweets

People Are Sharing Examples Of Russian Cursive Because It Looks Made Up

In the U.S., writing English in cursive hasn’t really been taught in schools in over a decade. I’d be curious if younger people who were never forced to do little exercises over and over to connect the C to the T would even be able to read it. If I ever thought about it, I’d assume they definitely can’t read Russian cursive, which is in both another language and another alphabet.

But I haven’t thought about it much until seeing this tweet from @beanerbastard in which they wrote, “Losing my mind after learning about Russian cursive.” Um, did you know Russian cursive looks like this?

If, like me, you’d never seen Russian cursive, you might be surprised to see it resembles in many cases a series of identical loops and squiggles that make no visual sense to anyone not raised to write them.

Here are some examples, like casual cursive in a notebook:

And this is how cursive looks in what might be an actual document of some kind. Exactly the same:

Maybe this little explainer will clear things up:

Haha, nope! This is absolutely incomprehensible to me and I admire that very much. There’s nothing like finding out that a different culture has normalized doing something incredibly hard. It’s inspiring. Inspiring to encounter yet another thing I will never learn to do, like sword fighting or chemistry.

People who are shocked by the way Russian cursive looks are enjoying this tweet a whole lot:

Though maybe not as much as the people who know how to read and write in it:

And there were a few other examples of “cursive” in other languages, showing that having to write in a hurry is cross-cultural:

One day, no one will even write by hand at all and all of our little scribbles will seem impossible to decipher. Learn to write your own name in cursive now for your grandkids to make fun of on the 2060 version of Twitter.

h/t