Russian handwriting...

...can be tricky for foreigners and natives alike. Try to read what Russian doctors wrote in your record – mankind will land on Neptune before doctors' handwriting becomes readable. :-) Mere mortals can have clear handwriting, elegant one, messy one, weird one, etc.

Half of my friends say my handwriting is unreadable, and the other half says it's special. But I'll still show you how I write. If you speak Russian but never actually read what others write it may be quite hard when you finally try. So why not start now?

...

Why are you running away? It's not scary!

See?

Well... I'll try again.

See?

There're many ways you can write those 33 letters in Russian. You will eventually develop your own style, but keep in mind that others may write differently, so you'll need to recognize letters in whichever way they're written. For example:

Don't panic! You can start by getting used to italics:

Россия — Россия

Москва — Москва

блог — блог

хобби - хобби

жизнь — жизнь

любовь — любовь

Финляндия — Финляндия :-)

Open you word processor and type there some Russian words you know or just random letters. Now change it to italics and play with different fonts:

As you can see there's some variety. I also highly recommend checking this article in Wikipedia – some nice examples there.

Learning how to read Russian handwritten texts takes time, but I'm sure you'll manage this if you try hard enough. Unless of course you don't need handwriting at all...

P.S. By the way handwriting in Russian is почерк. Have a nice week!