Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

Discussions about cursive writing on the Internet confused me quite a bit until I noticed that there seems to be a pretty large difference between what I learned in Germany and what people in the US learned.

What children learn in Germany for at least a few decades now looks like the following: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Vereinfachte_Ausgangssch...

From what I understand, the cursive script that was taught in US schools was much more complicated with lots of little flourishes. The simplified cursive script seems a lot more practical to me, and I wonder if that is a factor in the the decline of cursive writing. The negative reactions to cursive writing I've read on the internet from people in the US seemed a lot stronger than anything I've ever heard from Germans.

View on HN

Indeed, in France everyone still write in cursive even with ball pens.

Having to lift the pen for each letter seems so tedious that I don't understand how Americans can write such long texts in print.

The only case where we don't is to fill administrative forms, as they force you to write in print for legibility.

Interesting, I guess there are some regional differences then, as well. This is what I learned in elementary school in the 90s (in NRW): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Deutsche_normalschrift_a...

For what it's worth I still try to use it whenever I write by hand (which is rare in the first place), but often revert to print because I can't usually decipher my cursive a day later.

This is also what I was tought during the 90'ies in NRW. However, I know from my parents that during their time (somewhere late 60'ies) it was possible to take an additional course in “Schönschrift” (nice script) which translated to the handwriting Germans have been using for centuries before: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche_Kurrentschr...

My grandparents have letters that are written in this script, and I’ve seen it used in official documents from around 1900. I fell in love with this script and try my best and learning it currently. Just looking at it will make it obvious that it’s pretty impossible to write with a ballpoint pen.

That's what they taught me in Bavaria during the 80ies. It changes over time as well as (how could it not) from state to state. The tiny Saarland could introduce right to left, just to piss off everybody else (and save hugely on schools, because all parents would find ways to register across the border)

Given the amount of typing that today's children will do I think it's a very good idea to teach them something that stands a chance of not being replaced by something more primitive as soon as they leave school (or much earlier, as in the case of my age group). The days of artfully written letters written on expensive paper won't come back any time soon.

According to wikipedia, american may learn D'Nealian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian which is not terribly different from what is taught in France (Écriture A : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modèles_d%27écriture_scolaire_...) or from Deutsche Normalschrift (whose t is more readable than other german scolar scripts).

Since I was taught in a California public school in the 1980s, I believe I was taught using the Zaner-Bloser method. As someone else mentioned, the lowercase letters look mostly the same, but there are more differences in the uppercase letters. The main thing that strikes me in looking at your example is that I would have to lift my pen/pencil to generate most of those uppercase letters. In general, if I write in cursive, I only lift my pen/pencil off the page at the end of a word, and I tend to drag the tail of the last letter of the word back if I need to cross a 't' or dot an 'i' or 'j'. I also developed a habit of crossing my 'z' (and 'Z', and the number 7), oddly enough, from my German teacher in high school (though she was from Munich, and probably learned her handwriting in the 1940s or 1950s).

For what it is worth, the lowercase cursive characters I learned in American public primary school around ~2002 were very similar or possibly identical to the lowercase characters in your image. However, the uppercase characters did have some more complexity.

In Australia in the 80s I learnt something like this: http://www.startwrite.com/graphics/fonts-vic-link.jpg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com