How many countries use cursive

I can only assume your teacher prefers to read print rather than cursive. Apart from handwriting, in Russia you'll see cursive everywhere: in newspapers and magazines, adverts, shop sign frontages, and so on. Many letters in cursive are completely different from Russian cyrillic which is what Duolingo uses on its course. Yes, you haven't lived until you've put up with some Russian cursive.

But it's not usually as bad as those examples. And like any cursive it is extremely useful for note taking. Note that in the "Russian" discussion linked to just above the link by Norrius, "A similar thread," is germane to this discussion of cursive.

It seems that modern Greek may not. A friend who attended high school in Greece said, when I asked him, that people print. When I write in Ukrainian, my handwriting is a cross between the print and cursive. Understood, nonetheless. I have Roman-alphabet habits that I can't break. Russian cursive is so much easier on the hand than printing it. We were required to learn that in high school Russian class.

In Japanese, Korean and Chinese, they sometimes use a special technique of writing with a brush and ink, it is the equivalent of English cursive. I guess it is mainly depending on the person who is writing.

I've taken a Chinese calligraphy class before, and the teacher called a type of "cursive" a running script, where you don't take the brush off of the paper while writing the characters.

It's hard to read but it's beautiful. In Slovakia, where I live, schoolchildren are expected to use cursive more or less exclusively for writing everyone, of course, learns to read print. Your teacher might not have liked you mixing print and cursive, perhaps? I am ok with recognizing print letters but my recognition and use of cursive is not so good. Not at all. I lived in Israel for a while and it is very common in Hebrew.

A whole different way of writing letters from the block print. Oh that is so interesting! I was wondering why my Polish friend writes his capital ''I'' like that x. Cursive handwriting is pretty much universal in Russian, with the rare exception. If you don't learn Russian cursive, you won't be able to read Russian printed italics, because the printed italics uses the cursive form of the letters, which for some letters are completely different than the standard printed version.

I know Russian has cursive and looks very nice. Woah, it:s so interesting to learn that cursive is not just an English thing. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet , which is not too dissimilar from the Latin alphabet. Every once in a while, people on the internet find an example of Russian cursive and make jokes about how illegible it is, with its impenetrable loops that make it look like someone was just scribbling. These examples, however, are just bad handwriting.

Greek has been around for a long time, and the writing style has changed several times. Before the ninth century, there were two primary variants : uncial and cursive. Uncial was similar to stone inscriptions and comprised disconnected capital letters. It was primarily used in official book manuscripts. Private writing would instead be done in cursive, which had connected, slanted letters. In the mid-ninth century, a new writing system evolved: minuscule.

It was based on the earlier cursive, and it predates the Carolingian minuscule. Like cursive, minuscule has a number of ligatures that joins letters together in writing. Eventually, minuscule was mixed with uncial, with the uncial being used as capital letters and the minuscule used as lower case. In the 1, years since then, the letters have continued to evolve, and the most modern standard is the monotonic orthography , which took hold in the late 20th century.

That means there are far more Chinese characters than Latin ones. Like, thousands more. But because it looks so different and there are so many different characters, it can be very difficult to read , especially for newcomers to the language. There is also a semi-cursive version, which kind of bridges the gap between cursive and non-cursive Chinese, as it still has the more artistic flowiness of the rough script but the legibility of the non-cursive writing.

Cursive is definitely not the primary mode of writing in Chinese. There will always be a need for some people to know how to at least read cursive. And as mentioned earlier, there are states that are working to ensure that schools will continue to teach cursive from a young age.

This does not mean, however, that handwriting will ever entirely go away. Despite this diversity, the teaching of cursive is often accompanied by a strong sense of propriety. What does research say on these issues? It has consistently failed to find any real advantage of cursive over other forms of handwriting. Simply put, our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate. Many people including teachers swear that cursive is faster, and cite not only the fact that there is less lifting of pen from paper but also their own experience.

Needless to say, the latter point is like me saying that English is a faster language than French because I can speak and read it more quickly. Tests on writing speed have been fairly inconclusive in the past. They compared writing speeds for French-speaking primary pupils in their respective countries.

While cursive is quite rigidly enforced in France, teachers in Canada are more free to decide which style to teach, and when. Some Canadians teach manuscript first and cursive later; some introduce cursive straight away in first grade.

So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade. Even in France, a quarter of the French pupils who were taught cursive exclusively and were still mostly using it in the fourth grade, had largely abandoned it for a mixed style by the fifth grade. They had apparently imbibed manuscript style from their reading experience it more closely resembles print , even without being taught it explicitly.

While pupils writing in cursive were slower on average, their handwriting was also typically more legible than that of pupils taught only manuscript. But the mixed style allowed for greater speed with barely any deficit in legibility. That idea is supported by Virginia Berninger, a professor of education psychology at the University of Washington.

Does cursive help with writing and reading disorders such as dyslexia? Because cursive writing is more challenging for motor coordination and for sheer complexity of the letters, some early research from the s to the s indicated that children develop their writing skills sooner and more legibly with manuscript. Because they have to lift pen from paper between each letter, children prepare better for the next letter.

Some recent studies suggest that freeing up cognitive resources that are otherwise devoted to the challenge of simply making the more elaborate cursive forms on paper will leave children more articulate and accurate in what they write. In a study in Quebec, Bara and Morin found no reading difficulties in primary-school children that correlated with learning cursive. Yet a more recent study by the pair and their colleagues, comparing Canadian and French primary schoolers, showed that those who learned only cursive handwriting performed more poorly than those who learned manuscript, or both styles, in recognizing and identifying the sound and name of individual letters.

Regardless of how significant or lasting these differences are, it makes sense that they should exist. But whether it makes any difference, in this regard, which form of handwriting is taught is less clear.

In short, the jury is out over whether it is better to learn manuscript, cursive, or both forms of handwriting. There may be pros and cons in all cases. W hy then do some educational systems place such importance on learning cursive? How, if not by consulting the evidence, are educational policy and teaching practices formed? In , Bara and Morin decided to take a close look at why teachers do what they do.