Improving my English handwriting in preparation for cursive Cyrillic

Question

I'm currently studying Russian. Currently, our class is only using upright Cyrillic, but I assume that after we learn the whole alphabet, we'll start learning cursive.

Unfortunately, my handwriting of English isn't very good. My handwriting is poor enough that I sometimes find it hard to read what I've written, and I'm not very good at reading even well-written cursive writing in English.

I think it's partially because I'm sloppy and lazy when I write stuff, and also that the education system and I didn't have a very large focus on cursive writing when I attended school (K-12 was in NSW, Australia from 1985 to 1997) - my monolingual grandmother could read cursive Cyrillic better than I could when I was learning Mongolian!

How do I improve my handwriting? I suspect I should improve my handwriting in isolation from learning Russian, as it's easier to do them separately.

If I learn an English handwriting style that makes it easier to learn cursive Cyrillic, that'd be an added bonus, but it's not vital.

Answer 1

I wont't surprise you with the answer, that only practice in handwriting could help you to improve your handwriting. Moreover, you need to explain, what do you need Russian for :) In case you need to understand written text, speak and understand spoken speech, there's actually no need to learn Russian handwriting.

We live in an digital century. I think it's enough you can type all you need. The only reason to learn Russian handwriting is to master a language in all ways.

Answer 2

If you are studying Russian, there's really no point whatsoever in improving your English cursive writing if it is only as a precursor for you in learning how to write in Russian handwriting using Cyrillic script. In any case, Russians do more writing in Russian cursive than they do in reading/writing English cursive.

For learning Russian cursive you'll find that the Russian section of YouTube (YouTube.ru) has a very good selection of videos on how to write Russian cursive. You will be able to see for yourself the "learning Russian cursive" videos that YouTube.ru offers by going to YouTube.ru and entering the search term "Russian handwriting".

While most YouTube learning videos are good, I think the YouTube video titled "Russian Cursive" by "speakrussiannow" is a very good video to watch as you begin your learning on how to write by hand using the Russian Cursive alphabet.

Answer 3

Official Russian cursive has some letters which are quite hard to discern from each other, even (or especially) when written by natives. So for my Russian handwriting, I replaced standard cursive form with something close to uppercase print form, for "t", "m" and such. For "n" and "zh" I crossed the middle instead of one-touch cursive, etc. Was quite eligible for me and anyone else.