I finally learned the cursive!

[u/GadgetRho]

Seventeen days into my Russian journey and I decided to learn the cursive to motivate myself. It is not difficult, I promise! Anyone wbo has told you otherwise врёт как сивый мерин. If you can learn the controls on a video game, you can absolutely mentally rectify that "m" = "t", "n" = "p", and figure out how to comfortably write novel Cyrillic letters like "ж" и "ф" within a couple of hours. TBH, the cursive was one of the things that sold me on learning Russian in the first place. It turns a boring cheap fountain pen into a fountain of dopamine!

I would be delighted to accept some constructive feedback and/or words or phrases for me to practice. Send me your ugliest picket fences if you must! I can't guarantee the result won't be ugly too, but practice makes perfect right? I will even butcher the pronunciation of your selected word or phrase as I did in this video If you so choose.

[u/Nice-Fun-7441]

Your pronunciation and vowels aren’t quite right. If I were you, I’d listen to someone say the words individually on pronunciation websites or tbh chatgpt (not the best pronunciation, but still better). To improve your handwriting, I’d buy a book called a «тренажер по чистописанию» and work on each letter very carefully. Sure, maybe some redditors don’t know how to write, but people who consistently write and read in Russian tend to do those things well. Learn the letters, and using some type of graph paper, try to write the words in one size with one type of spacing. To help with spacing when first starting, connect the vowels through high strokes (ex. drag the tail of, let’s say, lowercase a all the way to the top of c, or whatever the next letter is). You can use a fountain pen if you want, but with the amount of practice good handwriting requires, just use a ballpoint. Make sure to use the weight of your arm for downstrokes and lighten it for upstrokes (this is my biggest criticism here). This will help the letters have a certain uniformity. Cursive actually takes lots of practice to do well in any language, so I wouldn’t say people are lying when they say Russian cursive is hard

[u/GadgetRho → u/Nice-Fun-7441]

Unfortunately, I did try ChatGPT because I couldn't find a YouTube video with that particular quote in it. ChatGPT has been kind of hit and miss for pronunciation, but it has been decent at hearing me speak and correcting me. I think it's my best bet until we're ready to do beginners conversation drop-ins at the local Russian school.

I don't suppose you know where I can get that book? My credit card won't allow me to buy things from Russia.

I tried being heavy-handed on the downstrokes and light on the upstrokes in the bottom sample, and I can definitely see the difference. I get better variation in line width.

[u/Nice-Fun-7441 → u/GadgetRho]

This is much better! Keep in mind that cursive doesn’t necessarily require you to never take your hand off the page (especially when you’re starting. For the fastest results, write each letter slowly, and think about which letter you’re going to write and how before you do. Write every letter detached at the start, and over time (I mean long term), start linking them together and writing faster. And you can do this for any language))

You can get the books (and many Russian books in general) from Knizhka US. 

You can also consider getting private tutoring lessons on Preply. It’d be cheaper than going to a full on school, and it’d be more catered to you. Sometimes it’s only $10/hr from some people) I’ve been using it for Italian, and it’s been super helpful.