Thanks for your input. After messing about with it some more, I’ve come to pretty much the same conclusion: there’s not a great deal to be gained by making yourself use it in your studies, but being able to read it will perhaps be helpful, and it’s not as if it takes a great deal of time to learn.

And yes, my Russian cursive often looks like a string of w’s joined together. Alas, I guess that has nothing to do with my writing, but instead, to do with the Russian cursive script.

I’m a Russian speaker (NZ by birth but I lived in Moscow for 7 years and my wife in Russian). My Russian is very good.

Cursive script is a funny one. I don’t profess to be able to write in it (I always use block letters when writing Cyrillic) but any knowledge and experience with cursive will come in useful if you’re in Russia. Sure, it’s only really used in notes between people but it looks like a real scrawl quite often. My wife often laughs when I tell her that her writing looks like a long line of w’s joining together.

Best of luck.

Ultimately, I figure Russian is difficult enough without making oneself use a script they don’t care for. I dislike writing in cursive using the Roman alphabet, and apparently, that dislike spans all scripts.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I’m all for phonetic languages, lol! Btw Jeff – i was checking out the website you link to, out of interest (i’ll shop around come the time i want to do something like that i’m sure, but it looked good at first glance) and i was wondering if you could tell me what connection you have to them? Did you take a course, or do you work for them, in marketing or something? Would be interested to hear if you’d taken a course, recommendations are always useful. (and i don’t mind at all if you work for them, it brought the option to light and i like the idea of a study holiday in Moscow!)

>>Whenever you need to write something yourself it is *so* much faster to use cursive

Rebecka: Hadn’t thought of that. Might try it and see. Writing print is a bit clunky and slow, although i’d not given it thought ’til now.

I see it as just lazy to only learn half of the alphabet. If you really want to know Russian, you should know it all!

Portuguese, on the other hand, is a little bit tougher than Spanish. Although there are many cognates between Portuguese and Spanish, there are also many more sounds that I am not used to in Portuguese. The challenge of learning the ins and outs of a language (vocab, grammar, pronunciation, etc.) make it all worth your time and effort.