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Comment by Daneel_ | Hacker News Reader

I think that might be generational. I don’t know anyone under 40 who writes in cursive. I certainly don’t.

That's not generational. Living in France I can ensure you that in primary school, kids still learn and use cursive as main writing system. I wasn't even aware anyone would use anything else to write by hand in Latin script.

I'm curious to get information about how people write elsewhere and how does it look.

As for Germany, as far as I know only few states still teach cursive: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulausgangsschrift

The modern standard is a non-connected font https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift

Yeah, no idea how print became handwriting and handwriting longhand/cursive, but that's how it is and has been for decades in the USA.

In the US, when I was in grade school we learned both, but almost all the kids chose to write in Latin script when given the option. I think we learned that first and it just stuck.

One day the school principal came into our class, pretty randomly, and tried to emphasize the importance of being proficient at reading and writing in cursive. It gave “old man yells at clouds” vibes at the time. Looking back, it wasn’t all that important.

My grandparents are of French decent and my grandfather’s cursive was very impressive. I may have been more interested in learning it in school if what we were learning was more aspirational, like his writing. We were taught the D'Nealian method[0], which I still find rather ugly for cursive. Their selling point to us was speed, not beauty, but I don’t know anyone who got quick with it.

I still remember a kid in my class who transferred from another school, I’m not sure where. His print handwriting was immaculate and beautiful. The teacher forced him to change to D'Nealian, even for his print writing, because that’s what was in the curriculum. It was so much worse. The kid was super upset about it. Here I am, 30+ years later still upset about it as well… and it wasn’t even me, I just witnessed the injustice. I felt really bad for him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian (cursive and print examples are here)

Went through school in the early 2000s in US. We were taught cursive (script), but I don't think I've used it since school.

Seems odd, in hindsight, to teach hand-written prose uses a different set of symbols than when its typed out

How fast can you write in cursive vs non-cursive? I am much slower in non-cursive when writing.

The only issue is that my cursive is pretty lousy looking.

I'd hedge to say roughly the same, but that's writing print in chicken-scratch handwriting (which is my norm) and under-practiced with cursive. I'd suspect after using cursive a bit I would speed up. Similar to using home-row when typing vs pick-and-peck or whatever they call it

My phone would transcribe even quicker than that, though, which would probably be my go-to instead of hand-writing

I find it hard to speak into my phone while I am in a live meeting and trying to summarize my instant thoughts for paper or my Remarkable :)

The word "generation" commonly refers to year of birth and cultural context (e.g. geographical location). So yes, it is generational

It is probably country and language dependent, I think. I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian), and for other languages I personally also write in cursive (and learnt that in school). I'm in my 30s.

> I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...

Understandable.

OP double negated - cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

Russian cursive is actually not that bad to read for the most part. Russian “print” is super awkward because all the characters are very angular.

There are some differences between generations (younger generations are more likely to write “т” in handwriting whereas the “correct” form looks more like a Latin “m”, but with obvious examples excluded (like the above), it just takes learning as a separate alphabet.

> cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

I know. I always feel utterly embarrassed when Russian-speaking friends write down a movie title for me, and I have to ask them to rewrite it in block capitals.

That's a good one, I must admit.

FWIW, Serbian Cyrillic cursive does not have that issue, or at least not as bad: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/%D...

Conversely I don't know anyone who doesn't write in cursive. It's still taught in schools in the UK, and I still write with it and actively aim to improve.

i'm in the UK and most people i know drop cursive for non-joined up handwriting as soon as they get the opportunity.

My daughter simply cannot write without joining the letters, finds it impossible. Time will tell if this remains true. Everyone is different in the best possible way.

Still taught in uk primary schools as the fastest way to get words down in paper

Makes me wonder whether there are diction tests (I feared/hated those with a passion) in the USA?

Never even heard that term before. So: no.

Too late to edit, 'dictation' was meant. Seems I still suck at spelling ;-/

Still no :)

It's more cultural than generational.

It's both. In the US, schools are turning away from teaching cursive, which clearly makes a generational cut.

My understanding is that they started turning away from it, but have turned back in many states. We were told it was important that we delay teaching our child typing until they had finished learning cursive because it had been discovered that teaching cursive developed something or other that I zoned out on while waiting to ask when that would be. Education has fads that don't seem to line up with peer reviewed articles that well. For instance, current reading instruction is non optimal for dyslexic students, while early 20th century instruction seems to (not entirely intentionally) worked much better.

Edit: Apparently it has to do with dyslexia and executive functioning. California and Texas amongst others have now required it be resumed. So there is a roughly decade long gap in cursive in the us, maybe a little less.

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