What do the japanese think of cursive?

I was just wondering. When japanese people see that european languages can also be written in cursive, do they view it as a kind of second roman alphabet, like we view hiragana+katakana?

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Probably the same sense of dispair I get when confronted with handwritten Japanese.

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https://japaneselevelup.com/reading-handwriting-ultimate-weakness/

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Didnā€™t know @Koichi had been on BBC!! :OOO

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Several Japanese people have told me that itā€™s hard for them because itā€™s not taught at school.

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With the people Iā€™ve met, the older generationā€“people currently in their 50s and 60sā€“did have to learn it in school, so for them itā€™s not mysterious. Current students donā€™t have to learn it, but whenever I used it to show off, they thought it was another cool foreign thing, although theyā€™ve seen cursive here and there before. I know a few students every year like to practice it on their own too. But I donā€™t know if they view it in the same way that we see the different kana systems.

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My wife has a fairly high TOEIC level and had basically zero ability to read cursive, to the point I had to teach her how to write her name in cursive for signatures back when we lived in the States. So if shes any indication, at least for people in their 30s from backwoods é’ę£®ēœŒ (and i doubt that its been added to the English curriculum recently), cursive is a pretty foreign thing for them.

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I remember when I did a home-stay years ago in high school there was one kid in the high school English class who wrote in cursive and I was very impressedā€¦ (mostly cause it was even better than mine. Thatā€™s not saying much but still impressive)

Japanese people probably think of English written in cursive the same way I do about Japanese written in cursive.

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I was watching a video of a korean girl living in Brazil. She learned the roman print script so you can imagine her shock when in class the teacher started writing in arabic. Like wtf? That is what motivated the question.

I thought it was strange of you to compare english written in cursive to japanese written in cursive. So I did some googling and apparently cursive is dying in the west (especially english speaking countries). Some schools donā€™t even teach it anymore. Some kids these days cannot read it, much less write it. I find this very strange. I donā€™t think we were allowed to use print in school after kindergarden. In my mind, itā€™s not some curiosity. In my mind, if you donā€™t know cursive you are illiterate.

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Personally, I learned cursive, but I never use it. It doesnā€™t really add anything besides a sense of ā€œfancinessā€ and making me write slower.

I.e. neat if youā€™re doing calligraphy, annoying if iā€™m just doing day-to-day writing.

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In my country itā€™s still the preferred writing style that gets taught in elementary school. I was extremely surprised that other countries donā€™t do the same.

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tbh rather off-topic

Well, thereā€™s also the question of what you mean by ā€˜cursiveā€™. The US (to my knowledge) teaches looped cursive, very formally, to the extent that you get people who ā€œcanā€™tā€ write and/or read cursive.

In the UK we learn how to do ā€˜joined-up writingā€™, which is basically italic cursive. This should be perfectly readable to most people who can read the alphabet. So we do learn ā€˜cursiveā€™, but itā€™s maybe not what youā€™d usually think of as cursive, and thereā€™s no issue with people being ā€˜unableā€™ to read it.

Most peopleā€™s writing naturally evolves into some form of casual cursive, and nobody is particularly concerned with your writing after this so long as itā€™s legible. So thereā€™s much less of a divide, I think, between those who do write in cursive, and those who donā€™t.

It seems be a much less contentious topic here. I never see any debates over whether or not we ā€˜oughtā€™ to be teaching cursive, whereas it seems to be a controversial topic in the US.

Alsoā€¦

Why?

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maybe offtopic?

What I was referring to as ā€œcursiveā€ is this:
image

This is how elementary school children learn how to write in my country. Iā€™m not sure what kind of cursive it is tbh, or how it compares to what the US or UK children learn.

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They tried to teach me, but I refused to learn. I can not write in cursive, and reading isā€¦ Slow.

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Of my (admittedly rusty) cursive, and my regular chicken-scratch print above, which do you have an easier time reading?

Seconding that question @args.

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About equal

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Apparently this is still being taught in many parts of Germany, although there is discussion to switch over to something like this

I personally think this is a good thing, because nothing about cursive makes it inherently better for communication, itā€™s only value is aesthetic and I donā€™t think thatā€™s where school should put the priority.

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