The difficulty of Russian cursive
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There are many hard things about learning Russian. This is one of the hardest.
Selected readings
- "Cursive and Characters: Dying Arts" (4/29/11)
- "Cursive" (3/30/14)
- "Transletteration" (8/11/09)
[Thanks to J.M.G.N.]
Viseguy said,
January 2, 2026 @ 4:05 pm
These are rather extreme examples, but point taken. What the video doesn't show is the optional use of the line under 'ш' and over 'т' (cursive looks like 'm'), which enhances legibility.
I haven't been to Russia in decades, but I assume that cursive is on the decline there, as in the West, and for similar reasons. Can anyone confirm?
David Cameron Staples said,
January 2, 2026 @ 6:13 pm
A friend of mine works for a Herbarium, and her job for a while was transcribing the cards on specimens, which were written by the botanist who collected them in the field, and may not have been looked at since.
She told me the most interesting collection for that was of a Russian botanist who was working in Papua New Guinea in the 19C (I think it was Nicholai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay, but I could be wrong), and his notes were all in 19C Russian cursive, and also in contracted notes rather than long prose. And when she did managed to figure out what he had written, the find notes were just as likely to be the date and "on the banks of the river", and then she'd have to go to his journals and logs to figure out which river he was actually near on that date.
cyberiagirl said,
January 2, 2026 @ 6:52 pm
I didn't ever encounter this issue when learning to write Mongolian in cursive Cyrillic, but perhaps the letter order of Mongolian makes it rarer? I really like cursive Cyrillic, and since I learned it as a dedicated adult, mine is much neater than my English writing!
Mark Metcalf said,
January 2, 2026 @ 9:26 pm
As a student in the year-long basic Russian program at the Defense Language Institute (1979-1980) I had the privilege of o spending an hour every morning of participating in an hour-long handwritten (in Cyrillic) dictation exercise (AKA диктовка):
Definitely an opportunity to improve one's language skills. And the most legendary sentence of the entire course:
По льду и танки и друзовики. – The trucks and the tanks went across the ice.
Since then, my handwritten English has never been quite the same.
Sergey said,
January 3, 2026 @ 12:21 am
Like Viseguy says, the difficulty is overstated. They teach this kind of cursive in elementary school but then when it comes to actual writing in volume, everyone modifies it. Especially in college, when writing down lots of lectures, and the speed and readability matter. Two common things is to write "ш" and "т" like typed, ш as 3 vertical sticks and an underline, т as a vertical stick top down, then move the pen to the top left corner (so it tends to leave an additional trace from the bottom of the vertical stick to the left end of the horizontal stick) and do the horizontal stick. It's both more readable and faster this way. Even when writing as taught in elementary school, it's common to make the connections between letters different than curves within the letters or lift the pen for them.
Peter L said,
January 3, 2026 @ 2:16 am
Not only Russian; pre-war German, especially c e i m n u ü (also r v w)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
Rick Rubenstein said,
January 3, 2026 @ 3:24 am
"minimum" in English cursive is not too different from that Russian example.
JMGN said,
January 3, 2026 @ 4:39 am
@Rubenstein
"Minimum" is Latinate though… :-)
John Swindle said,
January 3, 2026 @ 7:21 am
I have copies of letters from my great-grandparents in Russia to my grandfather in Nebraska, USA. They're in German, in Kurrent script, with the notable exception of a page in Russian cursive from his school-age niece. I know even less Russian than German, but I found hers much easier to read than my great-grandmother's Kurrentschrift.
cliff arroyo said,
January 3, 2026 @ 7:23 am
Recently a Ukrainian (living in Poland a number of years) was complaining to me about what a pain cursive cyrillic had been in school… and claimed to not have the same problems with cursive Polish.
I find even non-cursive cyrillic to be a challenge (compared to Greek which was super easy to learn and read). Cyrillic (most of my experience is with Bulgarian) on the other hand remained intimedating blocks like машината (the machine) or линиите (the lines) I'm apparently not alone and I read once that this is partly due to the general lack of ascenders (like d, t, k in latin) or descenders (like p, j or q) in cyrillic.
I have noticed that modern printed Bulgarian often uses fonts that add more ascenders and descenders (using letters that mimic latin or greek). Italic Bulgarian can still be a handful…
Generally though it's less of a problem for native speakers since fluent readers won't be looking at individual letters but whole words or blocks of words. Still, of the three major European alphabets I think cyrillic is the hardest for those approaching it for a foreign language.
David Marjanović said,
January 3, 2026 @ 7:59 am
It's not on the decline in the West, just in the US. I was never even taught to draw printed letters by hand; a not very calligraphic cursive is just handwriting for me.
For Russian I learned handwriting anew – a very strange experience! But it's much easier than learning vocabulary.
languagehat said,
January 3, 2026 @ 8:18 am
The video is just cherry-picking for shock value (=eyeballs=revenue); I have been writing Russian in cursive for over half a century now, and reading it frequently, and have never had a problem. Sure, if you deliberately choose difficult examples and refuse to use the common disambiguations, you can make it look awful, but you can do that with anything.
There's more than one thing wrong with the "legendary sentence" По льду и танки и друзовики; the most obvious is that the last word has д for г ('trucks' is грузовики), but it's also missing a verb.
Mark Metcalf said,
January 3, 2026 @ 10:37 am
@languagechat
Thanks for highlighting my errors. Of course you're correct. Как мне жаль!
The actual sentence in the диктовка example was:
По льду шли танки и грузовики.
The tanks and trucks went along the ice.
Nat J said,
January 4, 2026 @ 12:17 am
I assume the last two entries in the video are some kind of joke. I realize the entire video is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the last two seem to be of a different kind. The D and g and M and m. They don’t resemble the block script at all. Is this just a bit of surreal flippancy? Am I missing something?
John Swindle said,
January 4, 2026 @ 4:54 am
@Nat J: The forms they use in the video for Д/д and Т/т are normal Russian cursive, so I wouldn't say it's a matter of surreal flippancy. They do look different from the printed forms.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 4, 2026 @ 5:11 am
Judging by the many Ukrainian and Belarusian students we get here in Poland, Cyrillic cursive is doing much better than Latin cursive in Poland. The general trend is that the most legible, prettiest handwriting I get on handwritten tests (in English) is from those East Slavic people. Shows years of cursive practice.
Myself, I'm old enough to have had eight years of Russian in primary and secondary school, and learning Cyrillic cursive improved my handwriting a lot. It was great fun too!
And it's not that difficult. Years later, I took part in an OCR project for a major tech company where I could do annotation for machine learning training without much trouble despite the fact that my Russian was moribund by that time.
cliff arroyo said,
January 4, 2026 @ 12:31 pm
" The D and g and M and m. They don’t resemble the block script at all"
Normal printed/cursive cyrillic. I remember seeingthe word 'gokmop' on a sign in Bulgaria once and it took me a moment to realize it was 'doktor'….
Nat J said,
January 4, 2026 @ 11:10 pm
@ John S
Thanks, I think I get it now. It didn’t even occur to me that those might just be the usual cursives. I know nothing about cursive Cyrillic, and I assumed that he was slightly exaggerating who similar the letters are throughout the video. I take it that he judiciously chose his words so that no exageration (or only minimal) was needed?
Vanya said,
January 5, 2026 @ 1:42 am
There are many hard things about learning Russian. This is one of the hardest.
Russian isn‘t particularly difficult as a language. Millions of people have acquired it as a second language, I interact in Russian all the time with people in the Baltics and Central Asia who learned it in school. Never heard anyone claim it is difficult. In fact Estonians or Lithuanians are more likely to claim their native languages are „more“ difficult since it seems to be a source of pride to speakers of less spoken languages that their own native tongue is particularly abstruse. I didn’t find Russian cursive difficult in the slightest, possibly because I belong to a generation that still learned English cursive. As others have pointed out pre-war German cursive was far more difficult to parse than modern Russian.
The hardest thing about learning to speak Russian really well, as in most languages, is not the grammar or pronunciation, it’s acquiring the cultural baggage that goes with it. There is a whole world of cultural references, literary allusions, jokes, and religious vocabulary that are unknown to most Westerners. Learning Arabic or Chinese presents similar issues.
David Marjanović said,
January 5, 2026 @ 7:03 am
Yes, but not without reason. Lithuanian grammar can be described as "like Russian grammar, only more so", and Estonian is both very different and puts its complexity in places you wouldn't expect.
John Swindle said,
January 5, 2026 @ 7:10 am
@NatJ: You're welcome. Yes, I think that's what was done.
Zorfwaddle said,
January 5, 2026 @ 9:44 am
@Mark Metcalf
DLI Basic Russian 86-87, same experience.
Three green peas, ABC, must buy you underwear Mr. Ed!
Retired as a MLI out there in 2006. We didn't teach cursive then, but you had to be able to read it for one of the FLO's.
Philip Taylor said,
January 6, 2026 @ 4:15 am
I think you should seek advice concerning your apparent obsession with TLAs, Zorfwaddle.
Andreas Johansson said,
January 7, 2026 @ 10:11 am
Unlike David Marjanović, I was taught to write print letters by hand before being taught cursive, but then I had very little reason to do so for the better part of a decade, as cursive was expected in school work and in any case faster, so when in my late teens I found myself having to fill in forms and the like were you couldn't use cursive I basically had to teach myself again. Wasn't terribly difficult, but still.
Nowadays what little handwriting I do is mostly notes that nobody but myself need to be able to read, and I tend to write in a horrible mix of print and cursive.
ajay said,
January 8, 2026 @ 10:39 am
I agree with Vanya – I learned French, Latin and Russian at school as a child, and Russian was only more difficult because learning the vocabulary was more challenging for an English speaker than learning French vocabulary. If you're learning "mirror" you have a much better chance of remembering "miroir" than "zerkalo". But the grammar isn't particularly tricky compared to Latin, the alphabet – including cursive writing – is easy to learn, and the pronunciation is extremely orderly.