Kurrent

Although the writing is pretty neat, I'm having some difficulties with the last word. Any ideas? Might be a first name, maybe something like "Dora"?

The first steps are the most difficult ones. As with every writing, you might want to learn the alphabet at first. But even if you know all the letters, you might find it difficult to identify them in a given scripture. Especially with Kurrent it's necessary to practice to read texts to get used to different styles of handwritings and the various peculiarities dependent on the specific writer or the time of writing.

At the beginning it might be difficult to read a text without knowing about its content (or context), but there are lots of resources online. Both already transcribed texts and, nowadays, even interactive exercises.

To get started you might want to have a look at the following resources. Please note that this list is neither ordered nor comprehensive.

Introduction

• Übung Kurrentschrift (theory + exercises, german)
• Ad fontes (theory + interactive exercises, english)
• A guide to Writing the old German "Kurrent" Script by Margarete Mücke (english)
• Altdeutsche Schrift (Kurrent, Sütterlin) lernen, kompletter Online-Kurs (video guide, german)

Further reading

• Anmerkungen zur Entzifferung der Deutschen Kurrentschrift im Allgemeinen und bei Friedrich Schlegel im Besonderen (german)

Tools

• Transkribus

If you know any other resources, that might be interesting, please share them here.