Lesson 15 - Russian Cursive (Letter "А")

Today you will learn to write Russian cursive "А". I will include
more than one letter in my future lessons.
Thanks to one of my listeners I was able to upload a "Russian
Cursive Workbook" in the DOWNLOADS section on the right.

The Cyrillic alphabet was adopted by the Slavs in about the 9th
century. Although it is named after St. Cyril (Constantine), it was
not invented by St. Cyril. It is based on the system of Greek
capital letters. If you know the Greek alphabet, many of the
letters will be familiar to you.
The Cyrillic alphabet, with some modifications, is used by many
nations in Europe and Asia, including Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia,
Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, Kazakstan, and Mongolia,
to name only a few.

Few Americans write in cursive script anymore. All Russians write
in cursive. You won't need to learn cursive to "get by" such as
reading street signs or newspapers, and Russians will be able to
read your notes if you print your letters. But you'll need to learn
cursive to read Russians' handwriting. If you want to learn "good
Russian" then learn to write in cursive. If you just want to "get
by" on vacation you can skip this.

Russian cursive letters looks quite different from Russian printed
letters. Some letters look like English cursive letters, but
represent different letters. The bane of Russian cursive is the
letters м т л и ш щ ц, which look almost identical.

Upper- and lower-case cursive letters look quite different. Thus
Russians use three distinct alphabets: printed, upper-case cursive,
and lower-case cursive.


In this example, each letter--upper and lower case--is followed by
the same letter in Russian cursive. You will notice that in the
block style, the only difference between the upper and lower case
letters is the size. In the cursive style, certain letters
distinguish between upper and lower case.

(Please follow the video for this lesson. Just click on the title
of the blog entry.)
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