I didn't get it until I started trying to say "hot potato" in the middle of a sentence, like "Look out! Hot potato incoming!"
The 't' in "hot" became more and more like a glottal stop as my tongue started to touch the gums of my top front teeth less and less.
Oh, yeah! It can vary from place to place and even from school to school even in the same place! There were even people saying that they can guess from which school someone graduated from based on how they do cursive. I think that's just nuts.
My cursive nowadays is just reserved for when I really need to write fast, and would tend towards some kind of a personal shorthand than any sort of legibility. 😅
What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.
Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there's no shame in sucking at it.
Oh, yeah! Sometimes context helps, but if you can't even read a single word, you're just out of luck!
I remember coming across a similar comment chain, and someone brought out cursive Hanzi, and everyone lost their minds.
IIRC, cursive capital Q is supposed to start way down, so that it'd look like an O with a broken infinity symbol in its butt, like this:
The direction of the strokes in the image is not how I learned it, though. Stroke 1 for the capital starts where stroke 2 starts, but going clockwise until just past where it starts, then smoothly start the second stroke (same direction as shown in the image).
However, I can see how it can look like a more flowy 2 and how people can say "yeah, that's a capital Q." Heck, cursive lowercase r barely looks like an r but people kinda get it.
Lol~ Thanks.
I grew up at a time when cursive is a requirement--not just for one class, but for all classes in primary school. I remember our teachers checking our notebooks and making comments on our handwriting. All our compositions and essays were required to be in cursive, and they check for penmanship, keeping margins and all that. It was a whole lot of effort for something that I rarely get to use in higher levels. I switched to print in HS, when cursive is no longer required.
I tried writing them so that I can post this. I might have failed in making them both cursive and legible, lol!
That very last line is my attempt at writing at speed. 😅
You got me writing 'vacuum' and 'anniversary' in cursive, and got so conscious about how I write it that my speed crawled to a stop and my handwriting got even worse than what I started with, lol!
In casual writing, I separate out v, w and other letters that are trickier to write in full cursive. Same goes with t, i, j so that I can do the crosses and dots before moving on.
All those seems to have done the job of making my cursive a bit easier to read. All hell breaks loose when I need to write really fast though.
EDIT: stupid formatting, lol!
My comment is self-documenting, I swear!
Because my work tends to have me working on a wide variety of features, and thus operating on vastly different parts of the codebase, I make it a point to comment out every change I make complete with the ticket that requested the change, and what the intended effect of the change is.
Cue me returning to piece of code I made (after the inevitable bug has arisen) and me staring at my own code changes in bewilderment, wondering what past me really wanted to do. Hahaha!
The alien impersonator was me all along! HAHAHA!!!
I mean, seriously, I am not a native English speaker, but even with my weird English accent, it only became weirder if I try to speak fast while keeping the emphasis on that 't' at the end of "hot". My native accent also probably lends to that glottal stop taking over the 't' and merging it with the upcoming 'p' sound. It also helps that the two sounds (glottal stop and the bilabial 'p') are on opposite sides of my mouth, so I can quickly sound them in succession. The end result sounded to me like an exaggerated "posh British" rendition, as if the alien watched way too much BBC before invading Earth.
It just sounded way weirder than I otherwise would be. I can't really describe it.