All about handwriting

I really like joined up type cursive, it’s very pleasant to read :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: I wish it were more common.

But I write print (?), like this font here. It looks unpersonal, but I hope the receivers will understand perhaps better. I learned to read when I was four, and read everything I could at our home and grandparents home, which meant solving some old fashioned writing like this :heart::

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Here we learn both, but I had to write in cursive during elementary school. That’s how I was taught:

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My cursive is a variation of this. :grin:

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In Spain, always cursive. Actually I’m surprised that it’s not teached everywhere, meaning countries with latin alphabet

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Cursive is usually a nightmare to me.
When I receive a card written in cursive, I usually need 10 minutes to read, and eventually can understand no more than half of the article.

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In Malaysia, we do learn cursive writing in elementary school (age 10-12) English class [That’s before we started using CEFR materials so I’m not sure how is it nowadays] but not many actually writes in cursive so it is recommended to use them only if you are writing to a youngster.

Add on: Here’s how my teacher writes when the words are connected to each other (not cursive)

We are taught to write clearly so that the examiners can understand our handwriting in the exam. Here’s my friend’s handwriting:


And here’s how those with good handwriting write:


As you can see, we don’t use cursive but we sometimes do connect the words together.

*I recently gave my English teacher a postcard to decipher and it took her 15 minutes to read the entire text. :joy:

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Good to know. If that is the case with Japan and other countries with a language not based on Latin alphabet, I’ll begin to write to them in capital letters.

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As mentioned by other members above, I think it is very possible that people cannot read cursive writing in Japan and China.

It is very kind of you to write in capital letters or in print.

To be honest, it is after I joined Postcrossing that I know Latin alphabets can be written in the cursive shape. :sweat_smile:
I learned to write Latin alphabets at school as follows, and I write like this on postcards:

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It really depends!

Often I have to just guess some words from context, actually quite many times I’ve had to basically guess the whole message. But sometimes just reading it a few times with some time and I’ll understand. But I would say I’m quite bad in it.

But with Russians, I have no problem reading their cursive (of English)! It’s generally more clear and round, so it’s easier to make up words.

I don’t write in cursive but my handwriting is more round and even in size, so I hope it makes reading easier, as I tend to write the card very full. With postcrossing cards I also write much slower, so my letters are not connected. Expect Y:s and G:s, I switch between cursive and not.

I can post a picture of an example, so maybe you can tell if it’s easy or not for you? It’s hard to be objective yourself and while I don’t consider it cursive, I guess it has some influence from it.

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I think your writing is easy to read because I can still observe the shape of printed letters from your writing!

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It’s mostly print letters. Only the “y” looks cursive to me.

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A comparison between my cursive and print handwriting:

I hate my print handwriting, because I always had to use cursive since my first years of school, so I’m not used to it. I try to use print letters when writing to someone who lives in a country that doesn’t use latin alphabet, but sometimes I forget.

And I’m pretty good at dechiphering handwriting! :laughing:

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Let me recognize what you have written:

Sometimes life i???te ??s condition that challenge ??s ??s the cel?ic goddess …

I am sorry. I struggled for 5 minutes and finally gave up. :joy:

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You’re from a country that doesn’t use latin alphabet, so I understand your struggles with the cursive letters. Haha. But I really would like to know if someone can understand my childish print handwriting. :joy:

I can understand your print handwriting very easily.
I don’t understand that language, but I can tell which each letter is.

May have some typing mistakes

telia 77, mas tambem compneiumas folhas que estavam caras la no site dos correios. Peguei modelos diferen- tes dessa vez, como passaros brasilei- ros, auto adesivos do soldadinho de chumbo, esportes olimpicos, insetos ilustrados, estadios de futebol, cor-

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Thank you! Sometimes my own handwriting looks quite incomprehensible to me. :laughing:

I can easily understand all of the above examples but unfortunately only speak English so I cannot actually read the message that is printed letters in Portuguese.

I rarely write in cursive any more and in fact, I wrote in cursive on my to-do list. Later when I looked at it again, I could not read a couple of the entries because I wrote so sloppily.

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I prefer reading print than cursive. When I write things by hand, I write in print rather than cursive to make it easier to read for others. I can read most words from meylinhares’ cursive example but some are unclear to me (bronazon? asts?)

I was taught cursive in elementary school but rarely use it in my daily life. I don’t think my old elementary school teaches it anymore and I’m glad for that because I don’t find cursive to be a very useful life skill.

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That script is so pretty! I recognize it from my postcards, since postcards from China often have very nice easy to read handwriting.

Well, I have some small reading troubles but in Russian/Ukrainian handwriting postcards only. Even if the postcard is written in English but by the Russian speaker. So in my opinion it depends on the handwriting sender abilities.

This is how we were taught to write in German lessons at a Russian school in the 90s. I still think this alphabet is the most readable (especially for capital letters). Later I used this cursive in English lessons at the university. And now I also sign postcards. I see in another variant the difference in the cursive of the letter “z”, it is more like the Russian “з”, but I have not met anyone else with such an option in the received postcards. A very interesting topic. Postcrossing promotes education. :slightly_smiling_face:

I wrote in block letters only for a girl from China. But the postcard is still on the way

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