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Relearning my handwritten Cyrillic
I finally bit the bullet and decided I really ought to look up the cursive Cyrillic alphabet again so that I can actually write things down in Russian (even if I can't type them). I used to be able to write long essays in this stuff -- I never did get terribly fluent in blind touch-typing in Russian, an absolute requirement since you could switch the computer keyboard layout you were using but not the physical keycaps, but handwriting was rather faster.
Anyway, I found a calligraphy chart and copied it out onto a bit of paper, and apart from a bit of remaining confusion between the cursive 'd' and 'b' (looks rather like an English 'd') and uncertainty about how to form the 'f' (a pretty rare letter, which is probably why it doesn't seem to join or write fluently) -- and an ongoing mental blank as to which way to loop the pen to form the little hitches at the bottom of the 'ts' and 'shch' -- it has mostly come back very quickly :-)
Capitals might be another story, as there are just a few that differ from their minuscule versions, and one doesn't get a lot of practice in them. And of course there is the ancient problem of differentiating the 'i', 'm' and 'l' (exactly the same issue that you get when writing 'm', 'n' and 'u' in a strict italic hand in English calligraphy, and the reason why I was taught to put dashes on my Ms and Ws in German... and still for my own benefit try to do so for the 'T' and 'SH' in Russian!)
My own handwriting with an ordinary (i.e. non-italic) nib; I can see I'm having trouble joining the 'o' and 'm', and the 'i' and 'ch', while nothing ever does join to a 'b'. Actually, apparently it does in the calligraphic example given, explicitly entitled 'Azbuka' (alphabet) :-p
The actual practice text *blush* consists of what I was reading/looking at last night, which is the YouTube hashtag "trimushkyetyora" (misspelt!), a quotation from a transcript of an interview with the actor who played Soviet Porthos (Valentin Smirnitsky), "I don't like to watch my own films because all I can see is the mistakes", a pretty common sentiment among actors, I think, and (upside down in pencil) an earlier attempt at transcribing a snatch of lyrics from the song I've been translating ;-)
Anyway, I found a calligraphy chart and copied it out onto a bit of paper, and apart from a bit of remaining confusion between the cursive 'd' and 'b' (looks rather like an English 'd') and uncertainty about how to form the 'f' (a pretty rare letter, which is probably why it doesn't seem to join or write fluently) -- and an ongoing mental blank as to which way to loop the pen to form the little hitches at the bottom of the 'ts' and 'shch' -- it has mostly come back very quickly :-)
Capitals might be another story, as there are just a few that differ from their minuscule versions, and one doesn't get a lot of practice in them. And of course there is the ancient problem of differentiating the 'i', 'm' and 'l' (exactly the same issue that you get when writing 'm', 'n' and 'u' in a strict italic hand in English calligraphy, and the reason why I was taught to put dashes on my Ms and Ws in German... and still for my own benefit try to do so for the 'T' and 'SH' in Russian!)
My own handwriting with an ordinary (i.e. non-italic) nib; I can see I'm having trouble joining the 'o' and 'm', and the 'i' and 'ch', while nothing ever does join to a 'b'. Actually, apparently it does in the calligraphic example given, explicitly entitled 'Azbuka' (alphabet) :-p
The actual practice text *blush* consists of what I was reading/looking at last night, which is the YouTube hashtag "trimushkyetyora" (misspelt!), a quotation from a transcript of an interview with the actor who played Soviet Porthos (Valentin Smirnitsky), "I don't like to watch my own films because all I can see is the mistakes", a pretty common sentiment among actors, I think, and (upside down in pencil) an earlier attempt at transcribing a snatch of lyrics from the song I've been translating ;-)
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We generally put dashes on т, ш, and п (t, š, p) in Serbian Cyrillic script, even though some language purists say that ш shouldn't have it. I don't speak Russian, but anytime I looked at the cursive I could barely make out the letters, even though most of them are pretty much the same as in Serbian. I suppose that once you have a good handle on the language itself, you start recognizing and understanding from context...
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I used to be able to read pre-WW2 Gothic (Fraktur) German type, because a number of the very old books I'd been doing teach-yourself-German practice in had been set in the old typeface, notably the Heine. After a bit of experience I could read it quite fluently, *until* I hit a proper noun or a word I didn't know, and at that point I was all at once right back at the start struggling to decipher the individual letter-shapes sufficiently to be able to pronounce the word, let alone understand it! Clearly my brain was doing an awful lot of predicting and interpreting from context, as opposed to actually reading the text in front of my eyes.
But that makes sense, because in English I'm a speed-reader: I don't spell out each word individually at all, I just skim over the whole sentence and inhale the meaning in one comprehensive gulp. Which is why I'm super-sensitive to grammatical errors, because as soon as the structure of the prose stops working exactly according to rule my brain can't subconsciously speed-read it any more. It does a massive hiccup and stops in order to force my conscious mind to puzzle it out instead, which creates a mental sensation akin to suddenly tripping over an obstruction on the pavement :-(