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?
Probably the same sense of dispair I get when confronted with handwritten Japanese.
Didnāt know @Koichi had been on BBC!! :OOO
Several Japanese people have told me that itās hard for them because itās not taught at school.
With the people Iāve met, the older generationāpeople currently in their 50s and 60sādid have to learn it in school, so for them itās not mysterious. Current students donāt have to learn it, but whenever I used it to show off, they thought it was another cool foreign thing, although theyāve seen cursive here and there before. I know a few students every year like to practice it on their own too. But I donāt know if they view it in the same way that we see the different kana systems.
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 éę£®ē (and i doubt that its been added to the English curriculum recently), cursive is a pretty foreign thing for them.
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. Thatās 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.
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 donāt even teach it anymore. Some kids these days cannot read it, much less write it. I find this very strange. I donāt think we were allowed to use print in school after kindergarden. In my mind, itās not some curiosity. In my mind, if you donāt know cursive you are illiterate.
Personally, I learned cursive, but I never use it. It doesnāt really add anything besides a sense of āfancinessā and making me write slower.
I.e. neat if youāre doing calligraphy, annoying if iām just doing day-to-day writing.
In my country itās still the preferred writing style that gets taught in elementary school. I was extremely surprised that other countries donāt do the same.
tbh rather off-topic
Well, thereās also the question of what you mean by ācursiveā. The US (to my knowledge) teaches looped cursive, very formally, to the extent that you get people who ācanātā write and/or read cursive.
In the UK we learn how to do ājoined-up writingā, which is basically italic cursive. This should be perfectly readable to most people who can read the alphabet. So we do learn ācursiveā, but itās maybe not what youād usually think of as cursive, and thereās no issue with people being āunableā to read it.
Most peopleās writing naturally evolves into some form of casual cursive, and nobody is particularly concerned with your writing after this so long as itās legible. So thereās much less of a divide, I think, between those who do write in cursive, and those who donāt.
It seems be a much less contentious topic here. I never see any debates over whether or not we āoughtā to be teaching cursive, whereas it seems to be a controversial topic in the US.
Alsoā¦
Why?
maybe offtopic?
What I was referring to as ācursiveā is this:
This is how elementary school children learn how to write in my country. Iām not sure what kind of cursive it is tbh, or how it compares to what the US or UK children learn.
They tried to teach me, but I refused to learn. I can not write in cursive, and reading isā¦ Slow.
Of my (admittedly rusty) cursive, and my regular chicken-scratch print above, which do you have an easier time reading?
Seconding that question @args.
About equal
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, itās only value is aesthetic and I donāt think thatās where school should put the priority.