Чуть не половина русского алфавита пишется как разные английские курсивные буквы. То-есть,

а в д е ё з и й о п р с т у (our "u" with a little hat)

не говоря о буквах, которые близки,
к н х ц ш щ ь ы ю (i+o with connecting line)
а какие еще--

б г ж л м ф ч ъ э я

Итого, остаетя просто десять «трудных» букв.

I learned to write cursive in the real Soviet style-- my teacher in high school had just arrived from Leningrad, and he had beautiful handwriting. So cursive wasn't a problem, even tho I am left-handed.

But reading someone else's is a whole nother kettle of fish, which I didn't overcome until 30 years later when, as part of a Sister Cities project to link up penpals between our town and a Russian town, in order to match up writers I had to read each one of a couple hundred handwritten letters!!

Almost all were connected cursive, but there were a few less-connected. I don't remember whether anyone printed their letter, but I wouldn't be surprised, even if they don't print in everyday life. After all when you write a lot, printing individual latters takes a lot of time. If you look at the history of cursive (I have), you see why the cursive Д is written exactly like our cursive G. The forward downward tail used to be longer, so the square box of the Д became a circle with a left-swooping downward curve and upstroke to get to the next letter. In a similar way, our normal lowercase "a" just came about by writing A fast, starting with the \ stroke.