Quote Originally Posted by TexasMark
Hi all. Just started with Russian (Penguin New Course book arrives today if Amazon does not lie).

I am a bit of a language junkie (I have a feel there are a few of us here), but this is the first time with Russian. Bit nervous about the grammar, esp. cases, but hoping that my very rusty knowledge of Latin will come back into play, along with an extremely rudimentary knowledge of Pali (both of which are case driven languages).

Why Russian? I have been studying Mandarin on an off for a year, but have become discouraged about the difficulty of learning the characters (the spoken part was suprisingly straightforward). The problem was that I did not really have a strong enough motivation to buckle down and study. All of the linguistic types think that the single most important factor in dictating success in language is motivation/need -- hence illiterate Port Said dockworkers being able to speak 12 languages and pampered British Ph.D's being able to speak just English (albeit rather well). I don't have a strong enough motivation with Chinese, but I do with Russian as I am a huge fan of Russian literature. If Bulgakov really is better in Russian, I just have to do it . . .

Anyway, my question is this: in your early days of study, did you use cursive to write your notes, answers to exercises, etc., or did you print? My problem is that even though I am able to distinguish and read cursive in books (with, I might add, difficulty), my own version is so ugly I am not able to read it. This may come from the fact that I have never written in cursive in any other langauge (my early schooling in England must have been at a time when it was not cool to focus hard on penmanship).

What did (do) you guys do?

This is a great forum, by the way. I've been lurking here for a couple of weeks.

Thanks.
I started writing in print when I first started that book but after I got to around chapter 5 I remembered that I had heard that if, "You do not write in cursive you will be considered illiterate," this spured me to teach myself Russian cursive in a few hours and since then it's all I have been using. It's really neat, and I think is a neat thing to get used to. I'd say learn it, it doesn't hurt.