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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Americans: Why do I need to learn it when I can just type?
The World: It's literally just writing. You don't want to learn how to write??
My kids are learning cursive and I'm glad they are doing so.
But one of the main point of cursive was to be able to write more quickly, and typing has absolutely replaced that need, many times over. And also you learn print first, so not learning how to write cursive doesnt mean you don't learn to write.
Ironically, your post is supposed to be insulting Americans for not being smart, but God damn is the point fucking stupid and ignorant.
It wasn't meant to be insulting to Americans, the hate for learning to join up letters and write quickly just doesn't really make sense to the rest of us.
You know what's stupid and fucking ignorant? Assuming everyone has a laptop on them all the time. Do people really not write notes anymore? Handwriting notes is much more conducive to learning than typing and is a basic skill that aids education at all levels.
I've got a phone on me far more than I have a writing instrument, let alone paper: and I suspect that is true for the overwhelming majority of people.
I'll even just give you that cursive improves retention and learning and fine motor skills (there are studies that go either way, and my personal experience is that it did nothing at all, but fig leaf): is the benefit worth the time versus just having more time in class for the subjects in question?
If you're giving the idea that cursive improves retention and learning then I would say yes definitely.
It's a revision technique you can use for every exam, at the cost of what? a year of lessons once a week or so? (I have no idea how long cursive is learned for to be fair, I just learned to join writing in English while learning other stuff, seems like a weird thing to specifically have a lesson for to me).
My point is you're not going to learn a meaningful amount extra with that time, you're already dividing your time by 10 or so subjects, having 10% more learning in each subject for 1 year out of the 11-15ish years in education won't make a noticeable difference, certainly not more than learning an effective revision method for exams.
Just my opinion anyway. As a kid I used to argue with teachers all the time that I shouldn't have to write things by hand because I'd be typing the rest of my life anyway. That doesn't help in office meetings taking notes though and even when I have a laptop the notes are no better honestly. I feel like if I learned to write then barely did it ever again it would be so slow that it would be a genuine disadvantage.
You'll give it to me? Thanks I guess. All I've seen are studies that show the brain learns better when using handwriting over typing.
I also tend to have a smartphone on me all the time, but if I'm in a situation to take notes, I'll always bring some writing implement. I'm not taking notes in an office meeting on my phone for numerous reasons and even when I'm at a multiscreen computer I still want to take physical notes.
Lol this is like the best example of pissing on my foot and telling me it's raining.
And if I had argued that we shouldn't need to learn cursive because everyone has a laptop all the time, this wouldn't be a completely fucking stupid argument. Alas, I did not.
I also almost never write in cursive and know how. I can count on one hand how many times in my life I was like "oh crap! I should switch over to cursive to save some time!" and I lost all the fingers on that hand in a freak grenade accident (joking).
This is especially stupid because I actually support kids learning cursive. It's just a skill that is much less important than it was 50 years ago and so I don't particularly care either way if kids learn it.
You can just admit you were wrong, its much easier than trying to pile on more nonsense to justify the ignorant insult.
I was wrong about what exactly? My facetious point about American and World views on the matter? I still think it was on point despite not being 100% serious.
It's absolutely commonplace in the UK to learn this at an extremely young age and not something that "takes up valuable learning time". It seems weird not to learn it. How about we don't learn how to paint either because most people don't have use for watercolours in their daily life?
I think the fact I'm being down voted by the Americans who don't want to learn cursive is kind of a hilarious confirmation.
There's no need to learn cursive, it serves no functional purpose that typing cannot match. Other than your signature, which... you have to learn how to do separate to cursive anyway to protect yourself from fraud by making it as unique and as difficult to replicate as possible.
Good luck typing something when you have no electronic device nearby or no power. I know we live in a connected, techno-cebtric world now, but it's wild to think that this simple skill is no longer valued at all by some.
Also, your signature being the thing protecting you from fraud is quite hilarious from a European perspective too!
Since the invention of the smartphone I haven’t been without an electronic device nearby for a single moment. And if by some chance I find myself in this incredibly unlikely scenario, a power outage that’s long enough to outlast my phone battery, and for some reason desperately need to write something down, I could just write it down in print. That is, if I can even find a piece of paper and a writing utensil. I just don’t think the few times over the course of my life that this incredibly unlikely scenario happens, will make it somehow worth it to learn and remember a second form of hand writing when the first will do.
Remember a second form of hand writing? What did they do to you in your schools??
Block letters to me are just the same capital letters I would use for cursive. They are one and the same to me and I don't get how its such a big deal to write fluidly in one pen stroke.
In America, cursive letters don’t look like block letters. Thats the point of this entire post. Kids can’t read it because it’s almost like learning a second alphabet. If they were one and the same why would anyone have trouble reading it?
In America plenty of people write regular print fluidly in one, or fewer pen strokes. But that’s not the same thing as cursive in America. Cursive is a very specific script of very extravagant, stylized letters.
I was taught to read and write cursive in grade school and now as an adult I literally can’t, because I’ve forgotten.
I think you need to look up the word cursive. Whatever traumatised you in school had a name that you didn't learn such as D'Nealian Script. Cursive is the all encompassing word for flowing joined up script.
I have a hard time comprehending why anyone would have trouble reading it in the first place.
You can take notes without cursive. Even if it's technically faster, most people's cursive is an illegible scrawl, often even to themselves. I can scribble really fast, too, but so what?
This is somewhere between annoying and a minor problem for most things. It became downright dangerous when doctors would write out a prescription, and the pharmacist would misread the dose by an order of magnitude or more.
Also, I like using fountain pens, and I find I have to slow down anyway for the flow to be right. Modern one's don't tend to dribble ink the way an old quill pen might, so lifting it from the page is no problem.
Yeah you can also learn shorthand and take notes super fast. But that is a completely different language. Cursive is literally just joining up letters you are already learning at that point in school.
Cursive is not just joining letters, at least how I was taught. Cursive is a completely different way of writing that involves specifically no up strokes. That’s separate from “joined writing” which is a term I haven’t heard before this thread.
I would call that calligraphy, not cursive. The cursive I was taught in the US has many upstrokes and you only lift your pen at the end to cross t and x and dot I and j.
I think this may be the crux of the issue. Nobody was taught a consistent ‘cursive’. We were all taught basically different dialects, without really realizing it, so nobody can read anyone else’s cursive
I mean, that was also what I learned in the UK. We used fountain pens specifically so that it had to be no upstrokes, but the alphabet wasn't as complex and dated as some people are posting examples of.
I think "joined up" is just the trashy crude way we call it! I think I had heard of the band Cursive before knowing what it was.
You’re right, that is stupid. Thats why most of us use smartphones, the fuck?
Where's the RFC for Lemmy by post office?
We don't learn "print" at all in Europe, so cursive is a synonym for writing here.
You never get taught to read letters like these?
Read sure, write no
So you are incapable of writing print, at all? 😐
At all is a bit of a stretch since it's quite simple, so I can write it, but I wasn't taught.
You should specify which country since other Europeans are disagreeing with you
I see some comments of people angrily hating cursive, and that's something a bit weird to me. Why the hate?
personally i'm left handed so school-taught cursive was much harder for me to write and t never got faster than block-letters (not sure what to call it, to me handwriting means non cursive and i would specify cursive but i know in other parts of the world that's different so in this message i'll use "block letters" to specific non-cursive) assuming i ever needed to read stuff again.
but i think the main reason people hate it because a lot of people have terrible cursive handwriting. if it took the writer 25% less time to write but it takes the reader 2x as long to read... that's fuckin annoying lol. i'm all for people using it for their personal notes but there's a LOT of people who shouldn't be using cursive for anything anyone else has to read.
I used to do data entry for the post office and the number of people who addressed their letters with terrible cursive was way too high. the OCR could interpret most block-letter handwritten addresses but it couldn't handle as many of the cursive ones because the characters are more ambiguous. often to read people's cursive you need to use more context (ex. disambiguating through the words around it) which just isn't possible for an address.
for people using "block letters" the OCR would only fail on like, cards for grandma addressed by little kids and times when the scan cropped out the edge of the writing. but we got tons of shitty cursive handwriting.
i later delivered mail for the post office and the distribution of block-letter vs cursive style handwriting was very different - more block-letter than cursive. making the overrepresentation of cursive amongst illegible addresses during my data entry time even more significant. it's not a perfect sample data set but i keyed thousands of letters per day during the data entry job and when i did delivery i'd say dozens of the letters i sorted were addressed by hand most days so it was enough enough to give me strong opinions.
Because it's impossible to read. Seriously it's just random squiggles It could be in Arabic for all I know.
If you want to write notes to yourself in cursive go ahead I don't care but as soon as you need to communicate with other members of the human race it's inappropriate. Especially if you also have poor handwriting.
... Bro? I think this is peak ignorance for you. Take a breath and a step back, what's up man?
It sounds to me like you don't know cursive, and don't want to learn it because it's difficult maybe? You have to give effort to learn things. Check out cursive and kind of teach yourself the letters and how to write. I'm sure there are apps out there, too.
Otherwise like.... don't be a dick about the things you don't like.
Surely the ignorance is on you for insisting everyone learn a pointless skill just because you like it even though it's a literally useless life skill.
You're explaining why you dislike it and why you prefer that it's not used, but why the hate towards other people simply because they use it?
Well it’s not “just writing”, it’s a second, wholly distinct type of writing from our primary form of writing, and its use is usually reserved for writing personal letters, which is something nobody actually does anymore.
If “cursive” has no meaning to you because it’s “just how you write”, then you have your explanation for why Americans don’t like it. We’re taught to write in print for everything important. And that means that everything important that we read is also in print. So cursive is just an extraneous form of writing, that the reasons to use are shrinking by the day.
That's the point of my comment though. I think most of the world does see it as the primary form of writing. Block letter are used only for the most official documents.
It’s the same in the US for the most part. Block letters are used for official documents, however that is generally the only hand writing anyone in the US actually does. Do people outside of the U.S. write a lot of personal letters or something?
I also wonder what type of writing non-US citizens are using. Because contrary to expectation, people in the U.S. do very commonly use a type of joined-up writing when writing personal notes, in journals, or on like greeting cards, but it is very distinct from what would be called “cursive”.
I feel like I'm going mad with this thread now. I write all the time be it notes or whatever, when I'm literally on a computer too. Weren't post-its created in the US? What do you do with them just stick them around? Notebooks at school? Do they exist anymore? Or is everyone just using their expensive smartphones as notepads now?
My mind is being blown by how little it seems you guys are using one of the most basic building blocks of society!
Everything I write with a pen or pencil uses unconnected letters and I don't ever.think about joining letters up unless someone unearths elementary school era trauma
In American high schools many have tablets or laptops for school work and note taking. Some American high schools still have you do written reports instead of typed, but you’re not allowed to use cursive, you have to print.
Overall you’re correct that handwriting as a whole has seen a steep decline in American culture, but it still exists in relative abundance, it’s just that the remaining use cases for it preclude the use of cursive writing.