I feel like I am taking crazy pills...

[genuinesarcasm.livejournal.com]

So I am just gettinb back into taking russian after a break. I just downloaded the driver from www.download.com that lets you toggle between latin and cyrillic characters when typing. It's a fun tool and has been useful. The actual link is (http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tg=dl-2001&qt=cyrillic%20keyboard&tag=srch)

HOWEVER, am I just crazy or have they left off the cyrillic equivalent of "D"? Maybe I am an idiot, but I've been staring at the key layout map and can't find it anywhere!

Is anyone familiar with this program? Where's the "D"?

Also, this program has options

Comments

[whitest-owl.livejournal.com]

Cyrillic "Д" is usualy on the same key as latin "L".

And you do not need any program. All modern operation systems have built-in support for different alphabets. Just turn it on.

[roseargent.livejournal.com]

What *I* need are little stickers or something for my keyboard so that I can see where the cyrillic characters ARE, blast it!

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Any keyboard sold in Russia has both Latin and Cyrillic letters on it by definition, and you can get one as expensive as $10 :)
Maybe some Russian businesses sell them in North America?

[olegmmiller.livejournal.com]

I have found that not having stickers has sped me up. you only do the folloing a few times before you remember where the letter you are looking for is:

for "я не знаю."
I would type the following:
я йцукен(delete extra chars)е йцукенгшщз(delete extra chars)нфыва(delete extra chars)чсмитьбю(delete extra chars)

so for each letter I didn't know I would literally type "qwertyuiop[]\" etc. to find the letter. It starts really slow, but now I can touch type on any keyboard.

[msk01.livejournal.com]

Try to use this virtual keyboard: http://translit.ru/?ru-keyboard

[oryx_and_crake]

Any Russian book/computer store

[kali-kali.livejournal.com]

What webbrowser do you use? In Mozilla Firefox, there is a handy extension called ToCyrillic, where you can type in Latin characters, then highlight it all and click "To Cyrillic", and it'll transliterate for you.

You have to remember some things, like "i" is и, "y" is ы and "j" is й, but once you learn that stuff, it's really easy and useful.

If you need to put the Cyrillic somewhere other than a webbrowser, just copy and paste from what you write in the webbrowser.

[roseargent.livejournal.com]

I do actually have a similar extension called RussKey (which you can just toggle to type in Cyrillic entirely, rather than highlighting and tranliterating), but I would really prefer to learn to type properly in Cyrillic, rather than using English phoenetic equivalents. In the meantime, yes, the extension is very helpful (and what I have the most trouble is remembering that, for some reason я is the q key, and в is the w key. You'd think it'd be, you know. V. But v is ж for no reason I can understand ^^; Everything else makes sense, though).

[olegmmiller.livejournal.com]

I did use something similar when I was starting.

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Actually, "Ж" for "V" has its story rooting back in termnal days, when they were 7-bit and character maps were hardwired into terminals itself. Some classical Russian terminals had a hardware switch that selected a displayed character set between Latin and Cyrillic for 7-bit connection -- it allowed use of Cyrillic characters even without native support on the host. And mapping scheme for these terminals had exactly that quirk -- it's basically just because "В" was mapped to "W" and there was no other place to map "". If you look closer, you will also note that KOI-8 codepage, eventually evolved on big machines, still had this quirk. ^_^

[3libras.livejournal.com]

It doesn't have A or B either. What the hell.

[oryx_and_crake]

Scrap the program and look into the community info - there is a detailed explanation how to make your computer type Cyrillic without downloading anything.