Yes, while this is technically a question, I felt it to be a little too mundane and pointless to go in GQ. So here we go:
In 4th grade in Australia I learned “running writing”. I learned to form Fs like this. After 4th grade I moved to Canada, where (because Australian schools are half a year ahead of their northern hemisphere counterparts) I sat through another 6 months of 4th grade and cursive lessons, where I learned to form Fs like this. I resisted the change at first but changed over soon enough because let’s face it, the Australian F looks kind of ass. After coming back to Australia I noticed that everyone here still used the mutant-S form of F.
Oh yes, that was the other thing. I thought the loopy F looked much better but was horribly impractical, since you’d have to stop in the middle of the letter and loop back in the opposite direction.
Of course, any discussion about practicality is large moot, since after 4th grade I never used cursive again
My handwriting is a mix of printing and cursive – whichever is faster at any particular moment, so there are different versions of a lot of letters (including, come to think of it, f’s), depending on whether they’re in the beginning, middle, or end of a word, and what they’re connected to on either side.
You ought to see how stupid I look when I have to sign my middle name on an official document and I don’t know how to write it in cursive. Normally my signature is just my first and last name, and that’s all I ever write in cursive since about 3rd grade.
I learned your first style (the correct style) of “f” in the US.
That second one looks like a mutant “b,” and that is the one that requires the change of direction as it doesn’t flow as well when you’re trying to write it.
I learned the second style in the US about thirty years ago and taught the same style to my daughter ten years ago using standard practice tablets.
The first one looks too much like an upper-case L to me. Never seen that style f before.
My third grade teacher, an elderly British lady, taught us the first style.
My fourth grade teacher hated the ‘mutant-s’ style and insisted on the second ‘f’.
As a side note, my first name starts with ‘G’ and I hate hate hate the uppercase cursive G (with SDMB appropriate picture!). I’ve never really settled on a substitute, sometimes I just do a fanci-fied lowercase g, sometimes I do a scribbly printed G, but I want something with style and flair, dammit!
Try to draw a circle and cross it in one stroke. You’ll find you have to start at the bottom left, and do a little loop… which end up looking like a 2. Cursive G, now, that’s what I don’t get.
We didn’t do running writing in primary school (Tasmania, 1980s, for reference), we did… freaking serifed italics. I mean I didn’t know that then, but that’s basically what we learned for the fancy non-printing writing. It doesn’t flow together in any way. It’s “joined up writing” without the joins. Ridiculous. It looks like crud. I got a friend to teach me “American” style cursive (which was close to copperplate but without the lovely difference in stroke thickness that you get from a fountain pen) that she’d learned in an international school. The F I learned in primary school looked like the f you’d see on music notation for forte.
I went to a German School and I also learned the “Lateinische Ausgangsschrift”. It was a pain for me, because I had frst gone to an American elementary school for four years and had to forget all the cursive I learned there.
And you’re right, the Australian “f” looks just like a Suetterlin “h”. My grandmother used to write letters to me in Suetterlin, but my mom had to decode them for me, because to me they might has well have been written in Arabic.
Thanks to you and Kellner. I came into this thread to post that I used to do the Aussie style “f” until my very old-fashioned German teacher objected. I couldn’t remember why exactly but I do remember he said it wasn’t an “f” but a different letter when written that way. It was highly likely that the Suetterlin “h” thing was the reason. For complicated nostalgic reasons it has made me smile to remember this.
