I had a penpal from Greece in high school. She had the neatest handwriting ever. She taught me a bunch of basic stuff, and it got to the point that we’d write our letters almost exclusively in Greek (a big deal, as this was before Google Translate was even a thing).

Cut to junior year of college. I took Classical Greek as part of my degree, and I was feeling like I had a leg up over my classmates, whose Greek handwriting looked like kindergarten chicken scratch, while mine was smooth and quick. I turned in my first assignment feeling pretty damn proud of myself.

About three assignments later, my professor pulled me aside with the goofiest look on his face…

“I appreciate the effort, but…”

You remember that phase I think all little girls go through in middle school/junior high? Where we have swirly tails on our G’s or our Y’s get all swoopy, or we dot all our I’s with little hearts?

Yeah…

Turns out, all the perfect little flourishes I’d been putting on my letters were not, in fact, part of the letters at all. My penpal had just still been in that phase when she taught me the alphabet!

some examples of printed vs. handwritten, and handwritten variability

chinese:

korean:

russian:

greek:

I remember once when I was taking a Japanese class, they teach u each proper stroke for each kanji etc and one day, we had a visit of some Japanese guy that was traveling through South America and he gave our class a visit. he introduced himself and proceeded to write the date in Japanese on the whiteboard and I still remember my shock when he wrote 日 basically in 2 strokes by doing a circle with a line through it 😂😂💀