Do adult Russians normally hand-write Cyrillic as cursive or as block letters?

Question

In The Netherlands, we learn to write Latin characters in cursive in school, but most adults write block letters in practice. My experience is that in other countries using the Latin alphabet, most adults use block letters as well. How is this in Cyrillic? Does handwritten Cyrillic by a typical adult Russian more closely resemble upright "block letters"¹, italic print, or the cursive taught in school?

The difference can be quite large (д/д, т/т, и/и) and a source of confusion to learners (for example, see Why does italic 'т' look like 'm', What is the stroke order for Cyrillic?, What are these Russian characters that aren't in the alphabet in my learning material?, What Russian letter is this?); and lower case д actually has three different shapes. I can read upright block letters quite well, italic block letters with some difficulty, how much may I need cursive?

Related: What is the preferred form of Cyrillic to use for handwriting?

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¹I'm not sure if this term is correct for Cyrillic!

Answer 1

In school it's taught cursive and only cursive, in many "serious" places (like government jobs, jobs in financial sector etc.) it will be considered very non-professional if you can not do cursive. In fact it's even hard to imagine that somebody does not.

However I have to admit that things are gradually changing and even Russian language teachers are adopting for such changes, although very slowly and very gradually. For instance, in 90s you were very lucky if your Russian language or Literature teacher (well, natural sciences teachers were more liberal) accept T form for lowercase. Now from what I see how my son is doing his homework - such deviations from the standard are tolerated.

Answer 2

Things may be changing, but I dare say an overwhelming majority of 'adult' Russians (those finished primary school 10+ years ago) write in cursive - when they have to hand write at all.

Writing in block letters has always been considered 'childish': only small kids do it because they haven't learnt any better yet. (But again, things are changing, and perception too).

Perhaps, because of less practice, the script can be inconsistent (I might even write т and т interchangeably), but it will be cursive nevertheless.

The main advantage of cursive is that it's much faster to write. Those who still have to write a lot by hand (like those proverbial doctors) always use cursive. The difference is not so much how a particular letter is written but the fact that they are joined together, and you don't need to lift the pen off paper as much.

I, for one (having finished my primary school still in the USSR) tend to write cursive even in English - unless I'm filling in a form or writing just a word or two.

Answer 3

As already said, all Russians are taught in school how to write in cursive and use it in everyday life. Writing with cursive letters is much more faster but everyone has his own style, that is sometimes hard to read, so sometimes you are asked you use block letters. That's why when you fill a form, for example when you apply for a new ID, you have to use block letters to write your name and other information to avoid any mistakes.

Answer 4

Many responders have already mentioned the cursive handwriting as faster...

In fact, perhaps unlike some cursive scripts I see daily used in Europe/US at least, the seeming purpose of Russian cursive writing is to write a word, or large parts thereof, as one line without picking up the pen from the paper and seeking to a new position to start the next letter of the same word. This "built-in" habit from the school impacts my handwriting in other languages, which some native-speakers (and native-readers) then reported to be curious and not the way they would write the same words and sentences.

I think this also impacts the aspect mentioned above, like interchangeability of "т" and "m" for the same letter - I also have this habit without a second thought, but if I give it a thought, the choice likely relies on what liason from the previously written letter would be simplest to implement without extra momentum to the hand... or maybe adding one if it feels tired from holding one position for a while and needs the slight massage of a more jagged writing :)

My schooling was in late USSR/early Russia, and while there was a strong emphasis (and significant grading impact) during Russian classes regarding legibility of what was written, I don't think there was much stress regarding the choice of variants to write same letters same way consistently.

UPDATE: I asked around, and my wife whose schooling was in early post-USSR years said they were drilled on proper cursive writing with one true font. Variations like the "T" examples above were not tolerated, treated as a mistake - that they twitched and put some garbage in the page and skipped a real letter from a word, thus wrote it incorrectly.

For schoolkids today parents can apparently sign a request on how their children should be taught writing - with cursive scripts and further enhancing that skill, or with block scripts and further move into typing/tapping rather than penning.

Answer 5

Here's a sample of hand-written lyrics done by a Russian born adult (me) prior to seeing this question. I will leave it you to decide whether it's block or cursive. I wanted it to be easy for my son to read so I left many letters unjoined. As you can see, the choice between т and m is somewhat arbitrary.

Answer 6

I wanna add my $0.02. As someone who grew up in Russia and went through school there. I'd say, writing other than cursive would just slow me down. Because in cursive your blue line just flows from one letter to the other. In block letters you would always have to stop, pause, find a new spot for your letter and continue writing.

Answer 7

1. As others pointed out it was required in russian schools at least 8+ years ago. Standard cursive can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet. д has two common cursive forms: tail going down and up. Latter is non-standard from pre 1918 that survived for some reason (it fits badly for fast writing) and some teachers taught it instead of standard one. Their kids later suffered from this deviation because most Russian teachers won't tolerate such chaos when strict rules exist. It is usually used in Italic fonts. Fonts have different goals, rules and allow madness to spread (like mixing print with cursive and some outdated/strange variations of letters).
2. It's much faster than writing print letters. Russian doctors use it to fill data where block letters aren't required (blazing fast but hard to read for untrained eye).
3. If print writing is mandatory at work - they will write in it and maybe will use few cursive letters instead of print ones (print ones are very bad for handwriting). If it's not mandatory and they write a lot they'll use cursive and maybe will use few print letters instead of cursive ones. Those who write rarely usually use mixed print-cursive and write same letter in different script depending on some associations in the brain (in word X they write cursive з and in word Y they write print з). Problem is mainly with Print script being dominant in common information sources and Cursive is dominant in academic studying (lecture notes, seminar notes, etc). If you don't use some knowledge for long time brain 'forgets' it. For most people that's what happens with Cursive while Print script always reinforced by all information mediums.
4. Average person doesn't need cursive a lot in modern times. But this knowledge is expected if you know how to write down talk/recorded speech and will be doing something like that a lot or will be dealing with handwriting of other people (academia, working with archives, reading some rare snippets of cursive text).

In school I usually practiced writing cursive without looking at notebook. 1st word requires one start location lookup, next word requires only fixed length shift from previous word's end, only few letters can cause some trouble at first. Can't imagine writing print letters like that.

Also training correct cursive writing (calligraphy) improves fine motor skills which are always good. It's simpler than learning to write thousands of hieroglyphics properly and effect also must be smaller.

Nowadays I rarely write a lot of text (in school and university it was many pages a day at least 5 days a weak, currently few short notes in a weak with lots of numbers and schemes) and my ability to write cursive properly degraded heavily.

Answer 8

Cursive or intersections with some block letters (like @Jum Klimov mentioned). No one uses block letters on their own when handwriting. It's way too slow.