How to read Russian handwriting ;-)
The whole process of reading cursive based on guessing the words you can’t clearly read by understanding the meaning of the whole text/sentence. So I (likely) won’t reveal anything unusual. And I will only share some examples.
Let’s move straight to the tips! (I found 3)
- don’t focus on the singular letters too much.
If you can’t read the word or two, you probably still can read enough to understand the meaning in general. So try to read the words which you can read then try to guess the rest. (you likely did something similar when you haven’t heard what your friend said so you tried to analyze the whole conversation and guess what it could be).
- learn how to distinguish between these 3 letters “Н” “И” “К”
You can probably think (based on youtube videos only) that the most difficult letters to distinguish are “Ш” “И”. Especially if they go one after another. In fact, the combination is not very common.
But these three letters are used in most words and they look almost the same.
Here you can compare the original text from strelkamag.com about human exclusion zones with its handwritten version (written by me).
I deciphered some letters so you can clearly see how similar they look.
Unfortunately, there is no universal key except practice. But don’t give up because sometimes even natives can’t clearly understand the handwriting and it’s nothing more than a skill.
- divide the word into letters
If you have to read the word and you can’t guess its meaning then do your best to divide it into letters.
These 3 words were given as examples of really hard words to read. Okay, without any context they seem to be almost unreadable. But let’s analyze one of them.
The first one likely contains 5 letters. You can try to distinguish between them so you can count more than 4 and probably less than 6.
The first letter must be ш or и and you can clearly see it. Then, if we can’t decide between them we move straight to the end of the word because this part seems to be easier to understand. The last letter is clearly the cursive а. The letter before have to be a consonant. So it can’t be и and it’s likely к or н. But firstly it’s closer to к. Secondly, the word which begins with ш or и and ends with -на can be шина and it contains only 4 letters. Or ширма but it is clear that there is no letter р in this word. And I can’t even imagine another word which fits (as I said the combination is not common). So we end up with к. So now we know the ending -ка.
So we are looking for the word which begins with и or ш and ends with ка. And probably contains 5 letters. And likely it is ШИШКА (a cone).
I know, I know the explanation is not easy and requires a great knowledge of vocabulary. But the more you see/read/write cursive the more unconscious and automatical the reading become.
Then, if you want, try to guess other words to practice. Later I will share more examples and more handwriting if you all find it useful.
Also, this post likely contains some serious grammatical mistakes. But I really tried my best to explain you what I personally find useful.
