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How can I get better at reading handwriting? Are there fonts that look like it, or web sites with examples for practice? Are there some common shortcuts that people take when writing by hand?

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For Q3 - there are, but I don't know them well enough. One think I do know is very common, at least on the mainland, is using the Japanese の in place of 的 – JIStone Dec 13 '11 at 21:37
I've never seen の used anywhere on the mainland - does it tend to be used in particular scenarios? – Cocowalla Dec 13 '11 at 21:48
@Cocowalla I recall seeing の in the mainland when I was there a while back. It was on some ad I believe. I was pretty surprised though, since it's hiragana. – mugetsu Dec 13 '11 at 23:28
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@JIStone: that's clever, because 的 has way too many strokes to be the most commonly used character :D – Petruza Dec 13 '11 at 23:30
@JIStone I doubt you have seen の in China mainland not where a Japanese restaurant or something like that. Maybe you saw is a symbol like の or δ which used to replace second character in a repeated word like 高高兴兴 – AntiGameZ Dec 15 '11 at 4:06

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I have been able to purchase in China books that have different styles of handwriting including shortcuts. They also have a layer of thin paper over the top of each page so you can trace.

You can also look for books that show common characters written in different styles from print, traditional to script etc.

This is not something you will be taught unless you pay someone to go through with you, as it's not commonly taught in classes.

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I don't think that you are taught to write "cursive" in Chinese, most of it is something people just adapt naturally. You just need a really good grasp of characters to understand it. Sometimes people write fast and tend to simplify parts. There is no standard mold for cursive like in english.

But what you can do is read a lot of handwritten documents, just doing that will allow you to see the patterns of how people write.

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there are more or less standard abbreviations aren't there?? like 口 becoming something that looks more like Ω rotated 90 degrees clockwise. – trideceth12 Dec 15 '11 at 4:14
not true. the rules of grass script went into a lot of simplified characters, and when you write cursive, you integrate those rules with other common practices. – magnetar Dec 25 '11 at 18:54

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