No. I was taught Sütterlin in elementary school, but I couldn't even begin to read the sample on Wikipedia.

I grew up in Germany and was taught handwriting there, and I get the same feeling as in seeing the relationship, but being entirely unable to read it.

This is what is taught in german schools: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schreibschrift#/media/Datei:De...

AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).

When I went to school, the one I learned was Schulausgangsschrift https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schulausgangsschrift...

To me, the Sütterlin sample on Wikipedia is completely incomprehensible.

I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.

They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.

Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.

If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.

I can read about 50% of the words.

It's easier than Kurrent[0], but not by a lot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent

Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.

In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group). I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...

Not at all, no. And I still learned cursive at least.

> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?

Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.

Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.

I'm in my late 20s, 0 chance of reading anything.

A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.

I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.

I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.

What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!

I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.

Danish-style kurrent is the final boss of my genealogy research. There's a nice image on the Wikipedia page. Look at the a, e, o, r, s, v, æ and ø in lower case, and imagine that written by a Danish priest with early parkinson's and/or being drunk.

> I landed on Kurrent

This is madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent#/media/File:Deutsche_K...

> now frequently sign my name with it to the general dissatisfaction of everyone in my life.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a special way to sign things, given how everyone's signatures looked like elaborate Lissajous curves. For awhile, once I had to start signing things, I took care to make sure my name was legible and consistent.

Then I realized I could just make a little wavy squiggle, and nobody cared. Eventually I realized that most signatures, I didn't even have to do a wavy squiggle - the credit card machines at stores would be perfectly happy to accept a straight line, or just a first initial, or a drawing of a kitty-cat.