I’ve been working on my penmanship in Russian, as well as learning words and letters. It’s been hard, having certain letter look similar to ones in English but sounding different really does throw me off.
Right now, I’ve been almost exclusively using Duolingo for education and then occasionally looking things up along the way as they pop up in my course.
I’ve been watching a handful of videos on YouTube for help- mostly to show me how to write the letters instead of guessing- as well as looking up pictures of the alphabet and people’s writing.
Russian writing is honestly so whack. Sometimes you can make out the letters and other times it looks like someone just made loops and lines over and over again. I’m a little confused on how it’s supposed to work, but I wanted to share a few things that have helped me.
[Image 1- Russian Alphabet, offers print and the cursive equivalent in navy blue, then the English transliteration phonetic equivalent in red]
So this image (image 1) is from https://russiainanutshell.com/russian-cursive-alphabet/ . I’ll be honest, I didn’t read this whole page just yet. But it looks really good. I actually just downloaded the photo off the internet a few days ago for personal use and then went back to get the link for credit and decided I should skim through the page. So what’s exactly what I did. But I like that it seems like a very personal and relatable webpage/blog and it appears to discuss just how crazy Russian cursive is.
[Image 2- neat Russian cursive written in dark blue ink against a grid in red. This is handwritten]
For image 2, I won’t lie. I don’t know where I got this from. I don’t even know what it all says. I believe these are all just very basic phrases and I can recognize a few of them. For example, the first line is “privet-poka” (hello-bye) and the last line is “kak dela - khorosho” (How are you-Ok!). I can’t read the word exactly but I recognize it as “OK/fine), which would be an appropriate response to the question. I do believe this is from a video, however. I could take the time to sit down and write it out, but I am not going to at this very moment. Right now, I just wanted to look at and see an example of really neat penmanship. Handwriting where you can clearly distinguish each letter from one another.
Trying to find where this came from, I think it is a screenshot from a video… however, this specific image is from amazingrussian.com . I’m trying to put a link in to the exact page, but tumblr mobile isn’t letting me. Like the blog the at the first image comes from, this page is also dedicated to Russian learning. The specific page that image 2 comes from also discusses cursive and penmanship. It’s very long, I had just used the image as a reference for how to write the word “privet” initially and went back to find the source. Once again, I just skimmed the page. I do plan on going back and reading all of these the next time I decide to sit down and practice my Russian. Which will be sometime later today.
EDIT: A lovely user had helped me out and translated and transliterated the writing from Image 2 for me and I wanted to include them here. I also did not want to edit out my own ignorance. I did, however, correct any errors I had. Here is the translations and transliterations:
1.) “Privet-Poka” is “Hello-bye”
2.) “Zdravstvuyte - do svidanya” is “Hello-goodbye” but in a more formal and official manner
3.)”Spasibo - pozhaluista” is “Thank you - You’re Welcome)
4.) “Kak dela - khorosho” is “How are you? -Good/OK/Fine”
Since tumblr mobile is still not letting me add more links to this post, I’ll either reblog this post with more link OR if that doesn’t work, I’ll just make a brand new post with more links. I’m going to tag these all under the same tag to make it easier to find, which will be “Russian Cursive Part 1”.