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psychoslavetoday at 11:12 AM4 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

47282847today at 1:55 PM

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

al_borlandtoday at 2:54 PM

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)

guentherttoday at 11:34 AM

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.

dpoloncsaktoday at 2:39 PM

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