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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, there are pens whose grip is shaped to teach/enforce the "correct" way. For example the Pilot penmanship or many Lamy fountain pens are popular ones.

That said, teaching handwriting is surprisingly very country specific. For example, in Germany proper grip and writing with a fountain pen was something you were taught in elementary school (I think now less emphasized) and simple cursive. In the US they seem to instead prefer throwaway pens and seemingly hard to read cursive.

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What's different about German cursive? I live in a German-speaking country now and I haven't really noticed any defining differences where I am, though I also wasn't looking for them.

Throwaway ballpoint pens seem to be the norm at least in university settings here, in my experience.

Working in an international school, I find that my German students routinely have the best formed handwriting of all. Many use Lamy pens. Chinese writing (in English) is easy to read, since they don't usually do joined up writing, and craft each letter.

The American one is much more extravagant/different from printed letters:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/48963623/american-cursive-ha...

In this sense it is more similar to the older German Sütterlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin or Spencerian script.

Looks pretty, but very, very hard to read if you are not used to it. The German one switched to a much more simple "Ausgangsschrift" after 1941 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausgangsschrift#Ausgangsschrif...

My impression in the US was that there you are taught cursive in school, hate it and then never use it again.

I learned how to write in Kurrent a year ago or so. I'm not quite up to speed with it, but it looks nice, and I think it has the potential to be faster than British/American cursive styles.

The other problem with the American approach is that you are never taught the proper motion patterns ("Arkaden und Girlanden", anyone?) that cursive handwriting consists of. You are expected to write properly but aren't given the tooling.

That's funny I kind of developed to writing in Ausgangsschrift naturally having been taught the more florid US style of US cursive. It's basically just connecting the normal print version of the characters so you don't have to lift the pen. Mine's more of a mutt though since it basically came out of just writing in print without lifting my pen as school demanded faster note taking.

In the US in the 90s, we were taught that Ausgangsschtift one. I don't even recognize the "American" one as a thing anyone uses here.

In the 90s most schools still taught cursive, but the US is big, so your school might have been an exception.

> In a 2007 survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades in all 50 American states, 90 percent of respondents said their schools required the teaching of cursive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive#Decline_of_English_cur...

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