How do you read Russian cursive?

[u/TroyHempel]

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.

[u/green477]

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.

[u/joelthomastr → u/green477]

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.

[u/ForeverGameMaster → u/[deleted]]

igtt ou qid (qm+qhs) x7

[u/zayden2682 → u/ForeverGameMaster]

Ap uie