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I am a 42 year old European and I'm so glad that cursive is dying out as a compulsory school subject. Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.

That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense. You can learn to read cursive quickly. In fact you have to learn to decipher it again for every decade, region, and person, because it differs so much.

I always wished for an OCR tool that translates handwriting into UTF-8 when I had to read it. Soon every phone will be able to translate it. I am happy about it.

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> Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.

If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more efficient and fast, as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often. You mostly glide over the paper.

This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down. Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at all, that is because they evolved to be written fast.

Whereas you can learn to do fast printing. My writing speed improved later in life once I convinced myself to switch back over to print characters -- I can speed up the process without losing legibility. Also some people do a mixture of the two, which really is writing out ligatures for common character pairings. I don't really do that, and it seams everyone sort of figures out their own stile, but it would be nice if written ligatures were taught as an in-between style.

Edit: To see examples, do a search for "fast printing", I know there were several good posts on one of the fountain pen forums. The style I liked referenced "bookhand", and to get good/legible at it you start by practicing writing small circles (both clockwise and counter-clockwise) and small straight lines (horizontal, vertical, diagonal with various starting positions). This also helps with general technical drawing, things like writing circles and making them larger and smaller. And learning to draw a straight line across a page freehand will help with character alignment.

Also If you want to write fast and don’t care about legibility, learn shorthand writing :)

Word. I learned Orthic recently. It's easy to pick up, unlike the other system (at least that's my impression after a day of investigating)

I considered doing that in college--decided against it because overall I decided it wouldn't be worthwhile. Yes, I could have taken notes faster but it's not a skill I expected to have much use for later in life. I could already see that the computer was going to pretty much kill handwriting.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I used to do printed characters. My writing speed and legibility (especially for quick notes) improved significantly after switching to cursive. Once you realise that cursive is basically just a way to write printed characters in one flowing motion, it's weird to go back to printed.

But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that might explain our difference in experience.

My guess is the biggest difference is how much you use cursive.

However, just like most skills, some people may be naturally better, so I suppose I could be wrong.

Yes, I think that's pretty much all true, now.

100 years ago, when accounting and bookkeeping were all done by hand, writing cursive was probably quite a bit faster, and with all the practice you got, just as legible.

In high school, I wrote almost everything in cursive, but over the next 10 years, computers replaced so much writing that I fell out of practice. I'm not sorry it's gone.

Still waiting for a really good stylus driven computer ecosystem. :(

Even 35 years ago when I wrote exclusively in cursive, it was significantly faster than printing. Everyone wrote in cursive.

It's odd to even see people make the argument that cursive isn't faster. Literally no one wrote in print except young children.

Cursive is definitely faster while maintaining legibility. It's just that no schools in my country has taught us how to actually write it efficiently. For example when I'm writing cursive I'm holding pen incorrectly (yes, there are more efficient and less efficient ways to hold it), I'm moving my fingers incorrectly, I'm moving my hand incorrectly, and in the end certain muscles required for the efficient writing weren't properly developed.

I've learned all this well after graduating from the university, so there is zero reason to train that skill today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of necessity, not due to efficiency.

I don't know what your country is but in a few US public schools we had fairly strict teachers trying to get us to correctly hold our pencils. They'd wander around class correcting people holding their pencil wrong, give out special grips that were supposed to force correct holding, and we were penalized on tests for holding our pencil wrong.

Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where it mattered. However they did try.

Ukraine. We were taught extensively how to write cursive, for whole elementary school, we were writing in special workbooks which reinforced the correct shape of the cursive letters, teachers were looking at us and helping us write correctly. Only it appears they didn't teach us the writing movement itself.

Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the former position is optimal, while I hold it between fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a) strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much, only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work with them.

I think I still write incorrectly, it certainly isn't legible, and I haven't researched the concept recently so all I have to go on is decades old memories. I do recall I was regularly scolded for having my hand on the desk.

> do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes

I remember trying to do this as a kid and wasn't able to actually hold the pencil like that. It would flip up out of my hand every other word or so (grip was tight enough towards the tip, but towards the knuckle I couldn't hold it, so the pencil would swivel around the tighter grip).

This is the difference between theory and practice.

In theory, with proper training, it is better. In practice, it's a mess.

I've said before: If you want to start hating cursive, start doing genealogy. It's takes so long for me to decipher what people were writing (they often were writing very quickly), and I learned cursive when I was younger!

(I sometimes run across census pages where the census taker printed. It is vastly, vastly easier to read).

Signatures have almost nothing to do with normal written script, they are a special mark that

1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique

2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much

Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing different things). I get printshops nearby.

I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic -- because it is easier to grade that way, and also because people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be used for emphasis).

Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain, maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.

In practice it works out great, this is yet another example of the whole "contrarian-means-im-smart" thing that's entirely too prevalent here on HN.

Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said, it's much faster to write than print. There are generations of people who have successfully written and read large swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new way of writing (which is what cursive is) and recommendations on practicing it.

queue xkcd reference about standards.

It might be much faster to write when you spend many hours per week writing on paper. I don't even spend spend many hours writing on paper per year! Abandoning cursive should habe been put up for debate already back when phones displaced letters in personal communication.

It doesn’t need to be on paper, taking notes with a tablet and stylus is a use-case as well.

Cursive is dying, at least in the US it's not taught in school anymore.

I was responding to the idea that it's slower to write put forth by the other poster.

> Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at al

Signatures are not cursive.

* In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down*

And right there is one of the crucial cognitive and proprioceptive benefits of handwriting over ‘keyboarding’.

I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive.

What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.

And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.

I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.

>This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down.

I know many people who can write cursive both fast and beautiful, most of them women.

The problem seems to be rather a lack of training due to a lack of interest.

Writing on the keyboard with ten fingers slows me down, but not because the ten-finger system is slow, but because I haven't trained it.

No, you can write cursive faster than printing--that's why it was invented. It's just that it takes enough practice doing it that it becomes muscle memory--it's not something that can be done well as a conscious act because the reaction cycle is too short.

It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure, balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each side--and even if you have both a speedometer and tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while you're trying to drive.

Agreed. Looks better, polished. All caps in drawings and technical documentation is appropriate though.

It's just profesional.. writing legible cursive is also part of the skill.

Are you also still using an ink pen that will smear all over the place unless you are pointlessly neat? As a left handed child learning cursive in school was an exercise in frustration since the school system mandated that it had to be done using the most outdated and counterproductive tools they could find. So instead of "properly" mastering it I noped the fuck out the moment it was an option.

> It just profesional

Most professional texts I am dealing with are digital and cursive is not the default anywhere as far as I can tell.

Being left handed is a disadvantage, but it really isn't something that changes whether you can write well.

I've seen the nicest script written by a left handed person, dramatic because the stroke curvature is inverted.

Yeah, technical drawings, systems architecture, as I mentioned elsewhere, block letters are best.

Mostly the cursive is for notes, requests, thanks - there are a lot of 'professional' arenas

"pointlessly" neat?

No. I stopped using cursive years before I had to. Other students mocked me for a while but it was worth it. To this day, I simply refuse to read cursive.

Why learn to read at all, when your phone can do it for you.

I said nothing about phones

Are you sure about that? I am under the impression that this was only true before modern ballpoint pens.

>need to write by hand a lot

There are less and less needs for this, so I think this is a good development

You still have to take notes and do homework all throughout >12 years of your early education, so learning how to do it efficiently is fairly useful.

Which is all increasingly done on computers

I doubt that many people are taking notes in any mathy class at least on computers (without stylus input). Even in non-math classes, notes often include diagrams and other drawings that are much harder to do real-time in computers than on paper.

> as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often Except for crossing your Ts and dotting your Is and depending on your language's alphabet, other diacritics which breaks the flow since you're switching from gliding over the paper to pattern matching letters and words from the start of the sentence.

If this is the goal, wouldn't it be better to teach a form of shorthand rather than cursive?

Indeed, and in the USA, stenographer's notebooks only disappeared from craft aisle of supermarket and drug stores during my adult lifetime.

// They're the pads with spiral at top, stiff cardboard back, Gregg Ruled with horizontal lines and one differently colored vertical line down the middle of the page.

Except this isn't the 12th century and we aren't all working as scribes in a monastery or whatever. I'm not paid by the volume of what I write, nor is anyone nowadays. If we need volume, we have this 19th century invention called a printer.

I think it's true in principle. It may be true for most. It was not true for me - one day I finally acknowledged that all my fast paced noted ended up as a squiqqly unreadable line, and went back to block printing my notes.

I think of cursive as an art or craft - not to say it's not a valid thing to learn, but also not a particularly practical or needed thing for most people today. I'm 44 and last time I did cursive was about 23 years ago.

I certainly don't think it's a necessary gate for my kids to go through. Things change. Life changes. Other than inertia, I feel cursive should go the way of logarithmic tables etc.

I did the same as you, switched to block printing notes, but then found I was out of practice at writing quickly for exams.

For me, the need for professor to actually be able to read what the heck I wrote continued out weighing the speed factor :). Legibly, I was faster block printing.

> you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often.

But you are contact with the paper far longer, which incurs friction and uses more ink/graphite. Moving the writing tip through the air is far easier and faster than dragging it along the paper.

With cursive, not only do many letters require twice as much drawing, such as letter "l" (ell) -- with cursive you have to draw twice as long a line (up and down again) compared with printing (a single stroke). But they also require drawing across the gap between letters, again slowing you down and not contributing to actually forming any letters.

I am old enough that cursive was taught and used throughout my entire educational period, but around age 11 or 12 I decided to start printing instead, and I was easily able to write as fast as my peers on in-class exams, etc. And far more legibly.

I learned my own version of cursive through trial and error, and I found that the most efficient method is to just barely lift the tip off the paper between characters, in a manner that provides little resistance from the paper. Usually, you'll see a light trace of the tip between the characters, but not as strong as some examples of cursive you might've seen.

If you're right-handed, yes. Those claims never proved true for southpaws like me.

I think most people here are only looking at cursive as a writing method only. When you're a kid, you're not only learning how to write (or history, or multiplication tables, or playing a recorder, etc.), you're always meta-learning. Cursive also helps you develop fine motion; history helps you train your learning of boring topics, retain them and link them; and so on.

I must concur, I dreaded cursive as a kid. My writing was never "tidy" though it was always very readable, and my teacher bugged to the point I asked my mother for a laptop to do my homework (this was in early 00s, in Argentina, so this was never a real option). I kept using cursive through university, as it was the fastest way to handwrite for me, and I keep using it nowadays, although not handwriting every day. I believe (although this is a counterfactual) I would be even more clumsy today if I hadn't learnt cursive.

Shorthand is better for this

Doesn’t matter. Either way you can only write as fast as you can spell…which has always been my primary limiter.

In peer-reviewed studies, writing cursive has been linked to deeper processing of the language than printing, just as printing has been over typing.

Early L1 development concerns aside, learning cursive was a pretty good ROI for me given how little time it took as a seven year-old, and how much time cursive has saved me over the years since.

Related research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/

So despite containing cursive in the title, the first study appears to be comparing handwriting as a whole vs typing, not print vs cursive handwriting.

The second study compares handwriting vs tracing vs typing, again no cursive vs print.

The third study compares drawing vs typing, it doesn't address handwriting.

Also all of them are using proxy measures like brain activity and not recall of the studied material.

I could actually accept the more laborious and slower process of handwriting may slow kids down and therefore spend more time thinking about a subject as a hypothesis, but that's not what was tested here. Such a hypothesis would however favour print handwriting more than the theoretically faster cursive.

Here’s one more narrowly focused on what you’re looking for. It compares students taught cursive writing, printing and a mix of both.

The students who only printed lagged on every metric: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/la...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_c...

Does the paper have any relevance to whether teaching cursive helps (causes) learning more generally?

Enough with "studies." I have multiple studies correlating that smokers survive COVID-19 hospitalization better than non-smokers. Should we adopt smoking as a health policy against COVID? I don't think it would be a wise recommendation when factoring in other health risks associated with smoking. There's a few studies showing how SAT scores declined once American studies stopped praying in school.

Deeper processing isn't necessarily better. I would bet it also takes "deeper processing" to learn all the characters in written Chinese. There's been movements to simplify Chinese, but never movements to complicate English.

Language is best when it uses as little processing as possible. Its meant to be a medium, not a mental task in its own right.

So taking your research claims at face value, that's not actually evidence that cursive is good. In fact, its the opposite.

As a nearly 42-year-old American, I fully agree with you. In particular:

> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.

Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.

Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.

+1.

I'm 56 and essentially can't write decent cursive anymore since like decades as I stopped as soon as I could. No problems reading when it's correctly written, but as a leftie I found cursive handwriting hard since day one, so I resorted to capitals only, save for my signature, which however is different every time: I have 5 filed at the bank as I can't produce two seemingly identical; I often joke with the clerk that for me would be a lot easier if they asked for a blood sample for DNA recognition:)

I've been learning Chinese. Learning to write the characters (not even memorizing -- just copying by sight correctly) has been a very effective way of learning to read Chinese handwriting, especially the semi-cursive script. With almost any writing instrument, the order and direction of strokes is important to reading Chinese, and the best way to learn to decode that is to learn to encode it yourself, probably.

I would suspect the same is true of cursive Latin script, in the same way.

That's a surprising point of view. In the schools of the 80/90ies, note-taking had to be done with pen and paper, and you were doing it for hours. Printed documents were rare (in the eighties Xerox machines were a luxury, so they used some sort of waterless printing [1] that left a strong smell of alcohol on the paper).

Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking, so why cursive was a thing was pretty obvious. It was also normal to write in cursive for homework, tests, exams. I am still using it at work today. And if I were to go back to school, I would definitely use it again, although my touch-typing is decent enough that I could keep pace.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterless_printing

Also, writing by hand has been shown to increase comprehension and retention.

Developing your own short-hand helps a lot or just going with a standard

If the purpose had been to be better at taking notes with pen and paper, than being taught to write in shorthand would have been a much more useful skill than being taught to write in cursive.

Shorthand tends to be somewhat difficult to read quickly, difficult to scan, and somewhat personal to the individual stenographer. To make the notes useful most people would need to transcribe them first.

It's not taught, but it is a skill one also develops. Probably this is not taught because french kids already have a hard time with spelling.

Fun fact: french physicians are well known for undecipherable cursive hand writing. Part of what makes it difficult to write is that they use Greek letters for short hand. For instance, they replace "-tion" suffixes with a theta, or the "ph" combo with a phi.

American doctors, as well. I guess as long as the pharmacy can read it, it's fine...

> Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking

You mean it should have been that. We had tons of people (me included) whose cursive stuff is 100% illegible (we were forced to use it for the first few years at school, not 100% sure if it was only the 4 years of elementary school) and as soon as we were allowed to use whatever type we liked (be it cursive, or printed, or a mix) suddenly I could read what I wrote and I was also a lot quicker.

> You can learn to read cursive quickly. ... Soon every phone will be able to translate it.

Not only does that require substantial backup, it also sidesteps the problem of writing. There will come a point when you need it. Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity. Your phone might just stop working.

And there's nothing wrong with being taught two ways of achieving the same. Or do you only know one way to add? One way to program? One way to throw a ball? It might even make the process more flexible and adaptable.

If we wanted backup would learning another language not be much more beneficial?

.-- .... -.-- / .. / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. -. - / .- --. .-. . . / -- --- .-. . .-.-.- / - .... . / .-- .- -.-- / - .... . / -.-- --- ..- - .... / - --- -.. .- -.-- / -.-. .- -. - / . ...- . -. / - .- .--. / --- ..- - / .- / -... .- ... .. -.-. / -- . ... .- --. . / .. -. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . / --- .-. / -. --- / -... .- ... .. -.-. / ... .. --. -. .- .-.. / ..-. .-.. .- --. --. .. -. --. / .. ... / ..-. .-. .- -. -.- .-.. -.- / .- .-.. .- .-. -- .. -. --. .-.-.- / .... --- .-- / -.-. .- -. / - .... . / ... --- -. ... / .- -. -.. / -. .- ..- --. .... .- ..- - . .-. ... / . ...- . .-. / -... . / .-. . .- -.. -.-- / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / .-- .- .-. / -. --- .-- / -... .-. . .-- .. -. --. / --- -. / --- ..- .-. / . .- ... - . .-. -. / ..-. .-. --- -. - / .. ..-. / - .... . -.-- / -.. --- -. - / . ...- . -. / -.- -. --- .-- / .-- .... .- - / .- / -. .- ...- .- .-.. / -.-. --- -.. . / ..-. .-.. .- --. / .-.. --- --- -.- ... / .-.. .. -.- . ..--.. / - .... . / -.- .. -.. ... / - --- -.. .- -.-- / -.-. --- .-- .-.. -.. -. - / - . .-.. .-.. / - .... . / -.. .. ..-. ..-. . .-. . -. -.-. . / -... . - .-- .-- . . -. / .- / .-.. --- .-.. / .- -. -.. / .- / ...---... / .-.-.-

Upvoted despite the "snark" and "typos" for being an actual valid message in morse code… I actually did get a giggle out of this. :)

The typos are mostly due to the fact I didn't use a translator. I actually do know morse (albeit not as my primary written language :).

Except the very last typo your translator may have run into. That's not a typo at all, its a prosign. There is a difference between ...---... and ... --- ...

Certain popular online morse translators don't know how to handle non-printed morse characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosigns_for_Morse_code

TIL Emacs has "M-x unmorse-region" for this type of situation

Then you'll also know only a small percentage of drafted recruits is actually deemed fit to send and receive Morse.

I'm thinking of the Morse code challenge in The Amazing Race. Noisy "battlefield" and a loop playing a message in dots and dashes. They had a key to decode it but utterly failed and ended up Philiminated. They test things but what was doable for the tester apparently wasn't for them. (Everyone else took the other side of the detour, they had no choice.)

.-. .. --. .... - .-.-.- / .-- .... .- - / .- / ... .- -.. / .. -. -.. .. -.-. - -- . -. - / --- ..-. / --- ..- .-. / . -.. ..- -.-. .- - .. --- -. / ... -.-- ... - . -- .-.-.- / -.-. .- -. / -.-- --- ..- / -... . .-.. .. . ...- . / ... --- -- . / .--. . --- .--. .-.. . / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.-. --- -- .--. .-.. . - . .-.. -.-- / -.. .-. --- .--. / ... . -- .- .--. .... --- .-. . ... / .- -. -.. / ... .. --. -. .- .-.. .. -. --. / ..-. .-. --- -- / - .... . / -.-. .. .-. .. -.-. ..- .-.. ..- -- ..--.. / --- ..- .-. / -.- .. -.. ... / .- .-. . / --. --- .. -. --. / - --- / -... . / .-- .... --- .-.. .-.. -.-- / ..- -. .--. .-. . .--. .- .-. . -.. / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / .-. . .- .-.. / .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. .-.-.-

Irony is a mask, the blight of those who can't quite coherently formulate their thoughts, and prefer to hide them instead. Has it ever convinced anyone?

... - .. .-.. / .- / -... . - - . .-. / -- .- ... -.- / - .... .- -. / - .... . / --- -. . / .-- --- .-. -. / -... -.-- / - .... --- ... . / .--. .-. . - . -. -.. .. -. --. / -.-. ..- .-. ... .. ...- . / .. ... / .-. . .-.. . ...- .- -. - / ..-. --- .-. / .- -. -.-- - .... .. -. --. / --- - .... . .-. / - .... .- -. / .- / ... ..- .--. . .-. ..-. .. -.-. .. .- .-.. / ... .. --. -. .- .-.. / --- ..-. / -.-. .-.. .- ... ... / .- -. -.. / . -.. ..- -.-. .- - .. --- -. .-.-.- / .. ..-. / .. / .... .- -.. / -- .- -.. . / -- -.-- / .--. --- .. -. - / .- -... --- ..- - / . .-.. . ...- .- - .. -. --. / .- .-. -... .. - .-. .- .-. -.-- / ... -.- .. .-.. .-.. ... / .. -. - --- / ... - ..- .--. .. -.. / ... - .- - ..- .. / -.. .- -- . / -- .- .-. -.- . .-. ... / .. -. / .- -. -.-- / --- - .... . .-. / .-- .- -.-- / -- -.-- / .--. --- .. -. - / .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. / -... . / -.. .. ... -- .. ... ... . -.. / .- ... / - .... .- - / --- ..-. / .- -. / ..- -. . -.. ..- -.-. .- - . -.. / .-. ..- -... . / .-- .... --- / .. ... / .--. .-. --- -... .- -... .- .-.. -.-- / -- .- -.. / .... . / -.-. .- -. - / -.. --- / -.-. ..- .-. ... .. ...- . .-.-.- / .. / -.-. .- -. / ..-. --- .-. -- ..- .-.. .- - . / -- -.-- / - .... --- ..- --. .... - ... / .--- ..- ... - / ..-. .. -. . / - --- / .-- .. - / -.-. ..- .-. ... .. ...- . / .. ... / .- -. - .. --.- ..- .- - . -.. / .- -. -.. / -.. ..- -- -... .-.-.- / .. - / .. ... / -. . .. - .... . .-. / -- --- .-. . / -. --- .-. / .-.. . ... ... / .- .-. -... .. - .-. .- .-. -.-- / - .... .- -. / -- --- .-. ... . .-.-.- / .. / -.-. .- -. - / -... . .-.. .. . ...- . / .. / .... .- -.. / - --- / ... .--. . .-.. .-.. / - .... .. ... / --- ..- - / ..-. --- .-. / -.-- --- ..- .-.-.-

About 10% of Americans are functionaly iliterate, like they have troubles to understand and form long sentences in writting. Learning second method seems wasteful in that case.

And yes, I know only one way to add, multiply and so on. Also I can only program in one way (in very specific language and heavy IDE support).

>Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity

I agree with your incredulity at phones being able to translate cursive, but on your second point, if you're alluding to another World War starting and our technological world being destroyed, then frankly being able to immediately and quickly read old letters between grandparents & older generations will not be of a high priority...

Not the letters of my grand-parents, just writing and reading current notes.

I'm sure if there's a survival benefit then they'll learn fast enough...

There's a multitude of other scenarios, of course, in which writing could be benediciary, but not enough to compel anyone to improve their skills. And then it dies, and Idiocracy is starting to look more like a documentary.

I have severe carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. I'm relatively certain that it was brought about by being forced as a child to write cursive for hours on end. We were even forced to hold our writing instruments in a specific manner. I would have horrible hand cramps each day, severe pain and I even have an abnormal growth on one finger from it.

I was forced to waste hundreds of hours of my life getting instruction in an arcane, obsolete format.

"You can learn to read cursive quickly."

The same is true about Fraktur (the old German script), and yet few people are capable of reading pre-1940 books typeset in Fraktur.

There is no way around it, the vast majority of people won't learn old scripts and they won't be able to read their grandparents' correspondence etc.

This might be worth the progress, but let's not pretend that the continuity rupture is smaller than it is.

This is what I found when trying to understand the history of Fraktur. It’s complicated to say the least:

"Fraktur is often associated with being the official Nazi font and is still being used by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany today. The fact that it was, ironically, banned by the Nazi Party is just a part of its long and strange history"

Source: https://www.typeroom.eu/a-nazi-font-banned-by-nazis-fraktur-...

Yes, the Nazis ironically considered Fraktur (whose existence massively predates Nazism, by hundreds of years) a Jewish influence and got rid of it. After the ban, the only place where it survived were tombstones.

Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_disput...

Curiously, the same goes for the stahlhelm which is widely seen as the signature item of the Nazi military. In truth, it was simply the traditional helmet of the German military which the Nazi wanted to replace with a more modern design, but it was already too late for them, and it was the GDR military that ended up using it.

s/cursive/COBOL/

Being able to understand old stuff is not a skill everyone needs to attain at school.

If you need it for your chosen academic or career path, you’ll learn it.

This makes me wonder (as a 30 year old who can't read cursive well). Can folks easily read English script writing from the 18th/19th century? The script writing from earlier eras looks fairly different from 20th century cursive.

19th century is rather easy, 18th century writing, with difficulty. The cursive taught in schools this last century is a streamlined, more practical hand.

> Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.

In my university you had to write so fast to follow the teachers that if you were not writing using cursive you were probably missing half of the content.

Did something change between generations? Because HS teachers would mythologize this but it doesn't match at all with my experience. Even ignoring that professors have slide decks and lectures are recorded professors seem to encourage students to only take light notes so you can actually focus and participate in the class.

or the university could just .. make recordings of the lectures? why should students be burdened with realtime handwritten audio transcription? if you miss even a single sentence it can fuck up your understanding of the entire rest of the lecture. but with video you can just pause and rewind, speed up and slow down however you want.

it's even worse in math / physics / anything that uses a blackboard -- you have to copy down what the prof draws on the board as well as what he says aloud. two simultaneous information channels, bottlenecked by handwriting speed and muscle cramps. students frantically copying down things by hand as professors talk is a ridiculous outdated ritual that ought to be binned.

You are so right.

When I will be king of the world, I will kick every professor who does this out of the universities immediately. Their didactics are so bad, they should not be allowed to teach.

I could be wrong as I am ESL and moved to USA at a young age.

I believe we were taught cursive to build motor skills. My teachers always gave me good remarks for my neat handwriting, and I remember spending hours practicing both regular and cursive characters. Fill out the sheet, then my mom would erase it and I would do it again and again.

It might not only train fine motor skills but since learning cursive isn't easy, it might also require practicing focus, self-discipline and tenacity.

True. I’m definitely not complaining that I got to learn to read and write cursive. I think it’s a beautiful way to express characters on paper.

Digging dirt would probably increase your motor skills better and would be a more useful additional skill.

That ocr exists, at least in some form. There are efforts to digitize old census records, which are written in cursive. Humans are just used to double check the work of the ocr program.

Especially, since every country has its own variation.

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