Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[smallwhite]

How did you do that 1500-words-a-day-in-Excel thing when you couldn't type French?

[rdearman]

How did you do that 1500-words-a-day-in-Excel thing when you couldn't type French?

I ignored acent marks and just used the letters. I was only trying to get the vocabulary and could self check mistakes.

[Elenia]

I'd suggest the Swedish keyboard, which is the same letter layout but also comes equipped with ´`^¨ over vowels for your typing please. The only problem is it lacks a cedilla...

BUT what I'll really say is: I'm with Iguanamon. I learnt how to touch type on azerty but it's a really horrible keyboard. All of my lecture notes when I was in France were taken by hand, and I stole a few handy tricks from other French students to get things down quicker - ̊ for ion endings, something like ˞ for all ment endings (which I extended to include all ent ending), as well as a few others which I can't remember anymore. They were fairly easy to incorporate, and made note taking a much quicker task. By the end of the year my listening comprehension had improved exponentially, as had my spelling. I was able to correctly spell a French word on first hearing without necessarily knowing what it meant - again, huge contrast from the start of the year when I was wondering why my literature teacher kept on going on about Rambo

[rdearman]

I'd suggest the Swedish keyboard, which is the same letter layout but also comes equipped with ´`^¨ over vowels for your typing please. The only problem is it lacks a cedilla...

BUT what I'll really say is: I'm with Iguanamon. I learnt how to touch type on azerty but it's a really horrible keyboard.

Yeah, kinda too late for all that. I bought an AZERTY wireless bluetooth keyboard, which is actually really cool! But I'm not using it at the moment. I took Iguanamon's advice and just used a notepad and a pen. I did a little bit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the notebook then checked it when I got home. It wasn't very encouraging to say the least!

I hand-wrote 48 words, and fully 44 of them were misspelt or the wrong words completely!

This is really bad, although from a comprehension point of view I understood it all. The problem is that I cannot spell in French. Period. Full stop. Can't spell at all. You'd have thought I would get some of them right, La, Le, etc... but no. So while very disheartening, it clearly shows that I need to work on my written French and transcription is as good as anything else for that purpose.

[rdearman]

Note to self: http://la-conjugaison.nouvelobs.com/def ... veiner.php

[rdearman]

j'ai une petite clavier pour français maintenant, mais est trés difficile pour moi. Est très strange, et je ne pas trouver tous là claviers. j'ai ne eu pas employé la dictionnaire ou une autre aidé pour cet paragraphe ! je français déteste maintenant.

vous est juste, cet clavier est douloureux.

EDIT: OMG, that was painful to type! I didn't have anyway to switch to a grammar checker or spelling checker, so had to remember all that. I'm sure I got it mostly wrong, but does prove how much work I need to do. (BTW, I meant I was hating the French language when typing, not French people, but figured most would work it out.) One good thing is that if I flip the OS back to using UK Keyboard, I can continue to use the AZERTY keyboard, and since I don't need to look at the keys to type on UK keyboard it is all good.

Actually I really like the way this keyboard is made, might see if I can get a UK version for my tablet. I have a bluetooth one for the tablet, but it doesn't fold up like this one.

[zenmonkey]

Don't get me started on keyboards.

Every few months I blow up and spend an hour search Amazon for a keyboard.

I use now a German layout on my Mac portable with Hebrew stickers - if I need French or Spanish accents ç or ñ just hold the key down and those pop-up. But for Tibetan, Hebrew, Arabic, etc, I need to use a virtual keyboard or plastic overlays. My typing speed is crap slow now.

There has GOT to be a better method.

[vonPeterhof]

I use now a German layout on my Mac portable with Hebrew stickers - if I need French or Spanish accents ç or ñ just hold the key down and those pop-up.

I find myself using the Azerbaijani layout a lot (especially when writing transliterations on Anki cards), as it has a ridiculously wide range of diacritics and additional characters (þ, ð, ß, etc.) readily available for some reason. There unfortunately doesn't seem to be a way to input œ, æ or ø, and also no easy way to add more than one diacritic to a single character (essential for Vietnamese), but it's otherwise pretty useful for things like macrons, ogoneks and schwas.

[coldrainwater]

Don't get me started on keyboards.

Every few months I blow up and spend an hour search Amazon for a keyboard.

I know I would note want to even consider learning German without owning one of these:
https://www.daskeyboard.com/
Inscriptionless is the way to go and they are tough as steel. I have broken almost every peripheral I own (I even broke my beloved ducky shine), but not these. I know exactly when that key is going to register (very important when the one your hit is F5).

For as many languages as described, I think I might almost bail and go speech to text. Failing that, I want Visual Studio-style autocomplete for languages. It is a strange world how we have Resharper for Visual Studio but are left almost hung out to dry with foreign languages?! Didn't they foresee us typing in five languages at once? I can also imagine a google translate option with N boxes, where a type in any one language will faithfully replicate and translate it into all language that you wish to write in. I learn slow enough where that may be a reality before I am actually ready to use it.

[zenmonkey]

I use now a German layout on my Mac portable with Hebrew stickers - if I need French or Spanish accents ç or ñ just hold the key down and those pop-up.

I find myself using the Azerbaijani layout a lot (especially when writing transliterations on Anki cards), as it has a ridiculously wide range of diacritics and additional characters (þ, ð, ß, etc.) readily available for some reason. There unfortunately doesn't seem to be a way to input œ, æ or ø, and also no easy way to add more than one diacritic to a single character (essential for Vietnamese), but it's otherwise pretty useful for things like macrons, ogoneks and schwas.

Thanks for the hint!

On a Mac the æ, œ and ø are easy as all you need to do is hold down a and o to get access to those letters. ß is directly on the German keyboard but also available with holding s down (along with ś and š). I use the Icelandic keyboard for ð þ as they are nicely placed on the right side then.

Cmd-shift <space> lets me change between keyboards. My current set-up:

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