Sure, they are different, but they aren't remotely similar to Latin either. I can read Cyrillic with some effort, but when I see Cyrillic cursive I immediately

Sure, they are different, but they aren't remotely similar to Latin either. I can read Cyrillic with some effort, but when I see Cyrillic cursive I immediately give up. I can imagine that it's even more difficult for, say, a Chinese speaker to read Latin cursive. That doesn't explain the shift towards sans-serif though. All the Chinese and Japanese fonts I accidentally ran into had Latin characters with serifs.