Ukrainian Handwriting

While Duolingo has been a pretty fun introduction to the Ukrainian language, it clearly has some limitations with respect to explaining grammar rules, pronunciation and (obviously) writing.

So, a little while back I picked up a textbook on Ukrainian and it has been vastly helpful in filling in the blanks of my knowledge. For example the letters Я (ya) and Ю (yu) become “a” and “u” if they come after a consonant. Wish I had known that sooner.

Another area that the textbook helped with was writing Ukrainian. It turns out that Ukrainian has a cursive form of handwriting, it’s fairly different than “print” Ukrainian, and it’s frequently used, unlike cursive in English.¹

Here is me practicing Ukrainian handwriting in my little notebook:

As mentioned earlier, some letters are noticeably different than the print version. The letter Т looks like a cursive “m”, while cursive М looks like the Greek letter μ (mu), while И looks like cursive “u”. Small letter д looks like a cursive “g”, while small б looks like Greek δ (delta), and so on. The word for dad, тато, in cursive looks like тато in cursive. The word вегетаріанець (vegetarian male) becomes вегетаріанець in cursive.²

At first, this feels pretty confusing, and tutorials on YouTube don’t always explain the nuances and differences clearly because they are taught by native speakers who just intuitively know. Thankfully, I have some pretty helpful resources shown below under “updates”.

In any case, what I can say as a non-native speaker, is that with time, practice, and a good textbook, it does eventually get easier and easier and in time your handwriting becomes more legible. Writing practice in any language can be a nice stress-reliever too. 🥳

Update: This book has been very helpful in clarifying Cyrillic (cursive and print) handwriting for Ukrainian:

Update 2: out of all the Ukrainian cursive handwriting videos, I’ve found this one the most useful:

¹ I learned cursive writing when I was in grade school, but my children barely touched it. Personally, it’s a bit sad to see it fade away, but then again I never used it very much anyway, even before the Internet. Not everything is necessarily worth preserving.

² As I learned while writing this, using italic font for a word converts it to cursive.