Does my Russian cursive look okay?

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Криста627
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Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Криста627 » Mar 7th, 15, 04:43

Sorry if this is not the right place for this; it didn't seem to really fit in any of the categories :| .

I've been working on Russian cursive, and would like feedback on whether it looks normal, and suggestions for what I could do better. Here is a sample; produced with a blue color pencil; the scan settings were darkened to make the text visible, and it was converted to JPG; which is always lame...
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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Taras » Mar 7th, 15, 18:43

Christa, your Russian handwriting looks exactly how Russian children in their first three years at school write :P It's predictable because you only study how to write in Russian, just like an 8 year old Russian girl :D But don't cry - your Russian cursive is easily understandable and quite good for a foreigner.

Below you can see my script of the same text.

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Текст.jpg (209.6 KiB) Viewed 10764 times


It's a sample of how Russian people actually write. All Russians have their own styles of handwriting, and their styles are significantly different from each other. So you can find scripts made by Russians, and their styles of handwriting will be remarkably different from mine. Nevertheless it will be good for you to write like me :D Just because I know my handwritng is quite good.

Speaking about your piece of writing, I've noticed the following flaws.

1. Short lines connecting a letter 'о' with a letter after the 'о' should start at the right middle point of the 'о', as you can see in my script. The lines should not start at the right top point of 'о', like in your script. This rule applies also for 'ю', 'б', 'в', 'ь' - I guess for all letters after which such connecting lines are used.

2. Your 'к' is almost the same as 'н'. You don't write a curve in the upper right part of 'к'. Animations showing how to write all the Russian letters are here: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/LRC/RU ... /index.htm

3. There should be also a curve in the upper part of 'в', not just a line (look at the animations).

4. Your capital 'Н' is written in the wrong way.

5. You should've put a comma after 'всякий' since 'верующий в Него' in sentence 16 is a participial phrase. In sentence 18 'Верующий в Него' is a compound noun (like 'brother-in-law') and for this reason there is no comma neither before 'Верующий' nor after 'Него'.

6. If 'в' is the last (or the only) letter of a word, it's not to have a connecting line. In general, connecting lines are not put in the end of a word because it doesn't make any sense.

7. I write 'ё' with two dots above it, since I think it's not a big deal to put two dots :D Besides for a foreigner it's sometimes difficult to understand whether 'е' in a piece of writing stands for actually 'е' or 'ё'. However, about a half of the native Russian speakers write 'е' instead of 'ё', and if you do the same thing, it's not a mistake.

Finally, if you just study Russian and you don't have the aim to grow advanced in Christian texts in Russian, I advise you to read texts and books having a more general vocabulary than a Russian translation of the Bible. Because such a translation has plenty of old-fashioned words like 'ибо', 'единородный', 'чрез', so it's no good for you to study such words.

Good luck :) !

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Криста627 » Mar 11th, 15, 01:11

Thank you very much! I was copying from the Russian Bible translation available for the mobile app Bible Offline, which apparently has quite a few typing errors :-(. I myself corrected for missing spaces, but for commas and stuff I don't have enough know-how to correct. Also this text evidently does not include the Ёё; if it had I would have written it.

I learned the letter forms including Н from this pdf: https://ilrussian.files.wordpress.com/2 ... sheets.pdf
and was also influenced by this one: https://lingualift.com/ru/files/docs/ru ... ursive.pdf

And also I'm sure it is influenced a lot, in such things as the placement of connecting strokes, by my English writing. The в in my text is written just as I write b in English; it is easier to write a line rather than a loop, probably because I write with my left hand. But if it is better to make a loop, I'll try to do it like that.

Thank you very much for your suggestions and writing example; it is certainly more legible than the one someone showed me on a different site :) .

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Taras » Mar 11th, 15, 21:50

https://ilrussian.files.wordpress.com/2 ... sheets.pdf has very detailed explanations of how to write Russian cursive letters. However, the upper hook of 'к' should be a little bit more noticeable than that they write because without this hook 'к' and 'н' look almost the same. Another objection is that there should be no connecting stroke on the right side of the last letter of a word, but they draw such a stroke near 'ь' in a word 'Очень'. Finally, their way of writing capital 'Н' is a bit strange to me.

https://lingualift.com/ru/files/docs/ru ... ursive.pdf and http://www.brown.edu/Departments/LRC/RU ... /index.htm show the same style of handwriting, and to my way of thinking, this style is more common than that of ilrussian. lingualift also shows connecting strokes, i.e. they write letters as if the letters were inside a word.

So, if you have already learned the basics from ilrussian, you'd better try writing like it's described in lingualift and brown.edu.

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Криста627 » Mar 13th, 15, 00:23

Here is another try: written a little more quickly.
Image
I ditched the blue color pencil, and did this one with a mechanical pencil. These sentences were written during my free moments during the last few days; the first was written the day I got your first reply, and somewhat expresses my feelings at that moment... :-) .

The sentences are based on various sentences from my online Russian lessons, mostly on http://www.russianforfree.com , as well as one I happened to find online.* And there are my various experiments with H; I think that the way I was doing it before was easier, but if I'm going to do it differently, I'll probably do it like the one in the words at the end, as that seems most congruous with the way I do the other capital letters such as K.

*the one that starts with "Съешь же ешё..."; silly Google translate thinks that "выпей чаю" translates to "the lazy dog"; even I can tell that's wrong. The only explanation I can think of is that someone at some point told Google that the sentence translates to "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," for no other reason than that it contains all the letters of the alphabet!

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Taras » Mar 14th, 15, 23:55

Your first two sentences sound like 'Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...' :D

You'd better say 'Вчера я думала, что я всё знаю', not 'знала'. The variant with 'знаю' does not have the sequence of tenses, like in colloquial English. In Russian the sequence of tenses is not used almost always when speaking about continuous processes or states, regardless of whether the style is formal or colloquial. Because when you thought you knew everything, you must have thought you would know everything the next day and the day after the next day and so on, i.e. in fact you thought you know everything nowadays. That's why Russian people say 'Вчера я думала, что я всё знаю'. The same explanation applies to, for instance, 'Два дня назад Криста сказала, что она может очень хорошо говорить на эсперанто'.

Про французские булки: You must've decided to reduce the phrase and to write 'французсих' without any 'к'. So, in fact the phrase still contains all the Russian letters :D.

The second 'Н' in the Н-handwriting-practice line is just okay. Try to write 'Н' in that way always.

Uncle Google really thinks that 'съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю' is 'eat else these soft French rolls, but the lazy dog'. However, the Uncle will not be crucially mistaken if you ask him to translate just 'выпей чаю' - the translation will be 'drink tea'. Anyway I'd translate it as 'have some tea'.

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Криста627 » Mar 15th, 15, 04:38

Taras wrote:Your first two sentences sound like 'Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...' :D

You'd better say 'Вчера я думала, что я всё знаю', not 'знала'. The variant with 'знаю' does not have the sequence of tenses, like in colloquial English. In Russian the sequence of tenses is not used almost always when speaking about continuous processes or states, regardless of whether the style is formal or colloquial. Because when you thought you knew everything, you must have thought you would know everything the next day and the day after the next day and so on, i.e. in fact you thought you know everything nowadays. That's why Russian people say 'Вчера я думала, что я всё знаю'. The same explanation applies to, for instance, 'Два дня назад Криста сказала, что она может очень хорошо говорить на эсперанто'.

Yeah, we covered that in the thread on the other site; actually, I from the time I first saw that sentence thought it ought to be the way you said (mostly because that's the way we do it in Esperanto, and because Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, knew Russian, the two languages have quite a few similarities). But it was different in the lesson on RussianForFree, and I of course assumed that the lesson must be correct... Someone on the other site said that the position of только (modeled directly after the sentence in the lesson) in this sentence is also incorrect.

Taras wrote:Про французские булки: You must've decided to reduce the phrase and to write 'французсих' without any 'к'. So, in fact the phrase still contains all the Russian letters :D.

Ehh, that wasn't any decision on my part; it's not the first time I've accidentally left out a letter or two when copying things! :-P

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Taras » Mar 15th, 15, 16:04

'Вчера я ничего не знала' is an absolutely correct sentence and it means only 'Yesterday I knew nothing'. The situation gets different if you add 'я думала', because 'Вчера я думала, что я ничего не знаю' means 'Yesterday I thought I know nothing nowadays', and this Russian sentence is much more common than 'Вчера я думала, что я ничего не знала' meaning 'Yesterday I thought I knew nothing'. The meaning of the sentence with 'знаю' is closer to what Russians actually think, and that's why such sentences are much more wide-spread.

So the sentence from RussianForFree was correct, but when reporting continuous states or processes, you shouldn't use the sequence of tenses.

The position of 'только' may be various. 'Я только знаю, что я ничего не знаю' is a bit less popular than 'Я знаю только то, что я ничего не знаю', but these sentences have the same meaning. In other sentences changing the position of 'только' usually changes the meaning - 'Она думает только об этом' means 'She thinks only about it' while 'Она только думает об этом' means either 'She does nothing but think about it' (if the speaker implies that 'только' refers to 'думает об этом') or 'She does nothing concerning it but think about it' (if the speaker implies that 'только' refers only to 'думает'). If the latter meaning is implied, the speaker stresses the word 'думает'. So 'только' refers to an implied phrase after it. However, it would be very strange if 'Я только знаю, что я ничего не знаю' meant 'I do nothing but know nothing', i.e. if the speaker implied that 'только' refered to everything following it, and that's why 'только' here refers only to 'знаю' and the phrase actually means 'I know only that I don't know anything'.

So 'Я только знаю, что я ничего не знаю' is correct, but when using 'только' think what it refers to and stress the object if the object is not all the words following 'только' in the sentence.

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Криста627 » Mar 18th, 15, 02:08

Taras wrote:So the sentence from RussianForFree was correct, but when reporting continuous states or processes, you shouldn't use the sequence of tenses.

There is also the sentence, "Они думали, что я всё знала" and similar ones, near the end in Dialogue 4, which is what I was thinking of; what about them?

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Re: Does my Russian cursive look okay?

Postby Taras » Mar 19th, 15, 12:16

Sentences with the sequence of tenses, like 'Они думали, что я всё знал', are correct and are used now and then, but they are much less common than the corresponding sentences without the sequence of tenses, like 'Они думали, что я всё знаю'. If you search for 'Я думал, ты знала' in Google, you will find very few links to this phrase and plenty of links to a phrase 'Я думал, ты знаешь'. I guess the latter phrase is about four times as common as the former one. Phrases like 'Я думал, ты знала' are used when a particular point in time or period of time in the past is stated or implied:

- Я думал, Алёна знала это ещё в школе.
- Мой сосед тоже думал, что она знала. (implying 'что она знала ещё в школе').

That's why the sentences from Dialogue 4 are correct but rare, and for you it'll be better if you use sentences like 'Я думал, ты знаешь'. To be more precise, I recommend you using a phrase 'Я думала, ты знаешь' since you're a female. :D

By the way, today I'm getting my master diploma, so next time you'll probably have an opportunity to communicate with a Master. :mrgreen:


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