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

[Ogrim]

However, like the Italian keyboard there are a lot of accented characters which it doesn't cater for. â, ê, î, ô, û, ë, ï, ü. So really if I want to type in French then Azerty is probably the way to go. It is a pity the Italian keyboard has the same issue as the Spanish one, since I use both those languages.

But you can type those letters with the Spanish keyboard. Shift + ´ gives you ¨, and Shift + `gives you ^. So shift + ´ followed by a gives you ä. (I just typed all this with the Spanish keyboard layout.)

[rdearman]

However, like the Italian keyboard there are a lot of accented characters which it doesn't cater for. â, ê, î, ô, û, ë, ï, ü. So really if I want to type in French then Azerty is probably the way to go. It is a pity the Italian keyboard has the same issue as the Spanish one, since I use both those languages.

But you can type those letters with the Spanish keyboard. Shift + ´ gives you ¨, and Shift + `gives you ^. So shift + ´ followed by a gives you ä. (I just typed all this with the Spanish keyboard layout.)

Oh... OK, I'll install Italian and see if I can do it, and if not revert to Spanish.

[garyb]

I use the "United Kingdom Extended" layout in Windows to type French and Italian. It does the job although it requires extra keystrokes for grave, circumflex and diaeresis. If you're on Mac or Linux, you should be able to type everything you need without changing keyboard layouts.

[Yuurei]

Still looking for French audio with transcriptions. Any suggestions welcome.

I can recommend hypnoweb.net for a ton of TV series transcripts. I know off-hand that they have transcripts for Buffy, Kaamelott (if you're looking for a real challenge XD), How I Met Your Mother, Supernatural and Westworld, but they obviously have transcripts for a lot more than that.

[rdearman]

I use the "United Kingdom Extended" layout in Windows to type French and Italian. It does the job although it requires extra keystrokes for grave, circumflex and diaeresis. If you're on Mac or Linux, you should be able to type everything you need without changing keyboard layouts.

I was hoping to do this on my laptop, but looks like I might do it on the Linux desktop. Linux always makes my life easier. (In fact I'm seriously considering wiping Windows 10 off the laptop)

[rdearman]

OK, did a second pass at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights last night for transcription. It was a bit of a train wreck to be honest. I found myself fiddling with a bunch of stuff. I needed to install a dictionary into my Libreoffice and I needed to install a French keyboard. This setup actually would have been sufficient if only I could touchtype in French. But because I kept having to refer to the keyboard diagram which I'd printed out it was a problem.

I know everyone tells me that I could use various qwerty keyboards, but I'm thinking just learning to touchtype in French is the best way. So after a lot of hummming and hawwwing I eventually decided to buy a folding bluetooth azerty keyboard. I'm also investigating typing tutorial software with French keyboard. I learned to touch type in English in a couple of weeks, so hopefully this wouldn't take too long. But even if I "hunt and peck" at least the keys are labelled the way I need them to be.

In effect I have become a victim of Murphy's second law: "Before you can do anything, you have to do something else first."

[rdearman]

OK, learning to touch type in French is a huge task on it's own. So I think I need to modify this experiment! I'm thinking that I'm very good at touch typing in English, so I think I'll stick with that. But the purpose of my experiment is to improve my listening comprehension. So after a little bit of thought it occurred to me that I don't have to transcribe the audio into French, I could actually just transcribe it into English. This would do what I need to do, which is to understand the meaning of French while listening to it. A word for word translation should in theory work just as well.

Any thoughts on this change? Basically I'm still doing the transcription, but also doing translation at the same time. It would make it more difficult to check errors, but as long as I'm doing word for word, I think I could do error checking fairly easily.

[iguanamon]

All I can do is tell you what I have done. I think you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. I would watch a video or listen to audio and transcribe with a pen and paper what you hear. You can use your own shorthand to make it faster- like "q" for "que"; "l" for "le"; "ls" for "les"; "j" for "je"; "av" for "avec"; "cm" for "comme"; etc. Don't worry about getting spelling right and yeah, you may have to pause the audio after a sentence or too to be able to keep up with your writing. So, instead of special keyboards, touch typing and a word processor, think spiral notebook and a pen.

This is what I did when I was going through a novela for Portuguese and when I was transcribing audio with Haitian Kreyòl. I made up my own shorthand which meant something only to me. I'd go back and check the transcript in Kreyòl against what I'd written. To me, the exercise was about training listening and the transcribing forced me to really concentrate on what I was hearing. Had I been translating back to English, I wouldn't have known if I was hearing the words correctly. It was an easy matter to go over what I had written and compare it to the pdf of the transcript. I didn't need to use technology to do it. But, ymmv!

[rdearman]

All I can do is tell you what I have done. I think you are making this more complicated than it needs to be. I would watch a video or listen to audio and transcribe with a pen and paper what you here. You can use your own shorthand to make it faster- like "q" for "que"; "l" for "le"; "ls" for "les"; "j" for "je"; "av" for "avec"; "cm" for "comme"; etc. Don't worry about getting spelling right and yeah, you may have to pause the audio after a sentence or too to be able to keep up with your writing. So, instead of special keyboards, touch typing and a word processor, think spiral notebook and a pen.

This is what I did when I was going through a novela for Portuguese and when I was transcribing audio with Haitian Kreyòl. I made up my own shorthand which meant something only to me. I'd go back and check the transcript in Kreyòl against what I'd written. To me, the exercises was about training listening and the transcribing forced me to really concentrate on what I was hearing. Had I been translating back to English, I wouldn't have known if I was hearing the words correctly. It was an easy matter to go over what I had written and compare it to the pdf of the transcript. I didn't need to use technology to do it. But, ymmv!

You raise a very good point! It has been a long time since I have resorted to old-tech like pen & paper because I touch type I can generally write faster with a keyboard. But before the advent of computers I did use pen and paper and even learned shortcut note taking. (Even wrote a book about it). So you're correct, that might be the way to go. As a bonus it is something I could do on the train while listening to a podcast or with headsets. Cool. I'll have a go at this on the way home tonight and see how it goes.

[coldrainwater]

My vote would almost always go to sticking with it and learning to touch type in French. Part of that is that I perceive substantial language learning benefit from it. The other side is that I think you can touch type almost in stride with English. Linux I am sure has different key mapping systems, but when I want to remap keys on a windows system, I simply use an international keyboard layout (US) and write a [simple/quick] Authotkey script to produce any accented characters that I want in literally any way that is intuitive for me. To be specific, I just map right alt + key for an accented character and shift right alt + key for upper case accent in Spanish. Inverted question marks and exclamation point stay in the same spot also get alt-mapped (alt+question = inverted question for example). Even with a Romance language with quite a few more mappings needed, I still perceive it as seem-less. As long as you avoid having to recode your entire muscle memory for a new language, I don't think touch typing would pose any problem at all. You can take advantage of your programming knowledge to assign toggle keys that you already know and thus don't have an appreciable learning curve.