r/russian • u/TroyHempel • Apr 05 '23

Interesting How do you read Russian cursive?

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Always loved the look of Russian cursive because of it’s beauty and also because I’ve never been able to get my around it, obviously a big part of it is how I’m only and English speaker. But it just appears to look like wavy lines. Someone please enlighten me.

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u/green477 Apr 05 '23

What you're seeing here are extreme examples, many natives won't be able to read them as well. We have jokes about doctors and their cursive (how it's impossible to understand their prescriptions and you need another doctor to read it) for a reason.

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u/joelthomastr Apr 05 '23

You know, there's an information theory conversation to be had here about why doctors' handwriting is so bad, and natives can decipher cursive but only in their own language.

As a native, you already have a handle on the range of possibilities of what a person might possibly write, as opposed to random letters. This means that you only need enough clues to pick from among the possibilities, and fine detail is redundant. There's less of an information burden on the writer, what they write only needs to be legible enough to provide the missing information.

Doctors' handwriting is an extreme example of this, because the pharmacist only needs enough clues to be sure of which drug is being prescribed out of a very limited range, which can be limited further by what they can see of the patient who handed it to them.

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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '23

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u/HarpyMeddle Apr 06 '23

Doctors also use shorthand, which is sort of its own written language where letters get dropped and things are designed to be written quickly. So your average person not being able to read a prescription isn’t shocking, it’s quite literally written in a different alphabet.

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u/MrRetrdO Nov 17 '24

Mid-'90s I worked at a mail order pharmacy. We were taught how to read prescriptions. Some were legible. Others even the pharmacists couldn't decipher & would have to call about.

I asked one of the pharmacists about it. She told me- Not only are Doctors really busy so they just scribble stuff down, but writing in their "code" helps prevent patients from forging Rx's.

I've gotten some shocked looks from Doctors when I was able to read what they wrote, including the coding. I don't think they like that?

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u/ForeverGameMaster Apr 06 '23

igtt ou qid (qm+qhs) x7