Cyrillic keyboard tip

[polyarnik.livejournal.com]

I use design programs on my Mac, that have the same keyboard shortcuts that switch between English and other keyboards. So, I never really had international keyboards enabled on my machine. For many years I used translit.ru instead. Until I realized I'm wasting my time and nerve cells, cause you do a lot of copy-pasting, and the site is not up all the time. For those of you who use Firefox, there's a better option: install this add-on. In Tools>Transliterator Options select your preferred layout (mine, of course was phonetic, like on translit.ru, since I got used to it) and you are done. Now you can type either English or Russian letters in every text field in Firefox, using F2 key on your keyboard to switch between them. Or you can choose a different key, if you must. I can't thank Alex Benenson (benya.com) enough for creating this tool. I hope you'll find it useful too.

There's also an add-on to post to Livejournal, but I'm less excited about it, as it doesn't handle embedding of youTubes properly.

Comments

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

i don't see what's so hard about having two keyboards installed on your computer and just switching between them...?

[polyarnik.livejournal.com]

Again, when I'm in Illustrator and Photoshop, trying to do any shortcut with Command/Space in it, I get layouts switched instead. On Mac you can't do anything about it.

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

oh, sorry, i read your post wrong. i thought you meant that photoshop used the same commands whether you're in english or russian keyboard so you never installed russian. which, looking at it, makes no sense.

the trouble with this firefox addon is that it's only for firefox, so if you need to type in word or something you're SOL. :/

[polyarnik.livejournal.com]

I'm aware of this limitation. But I don't do much typing outside of my browser anyway. And I thought there are others out there who for one reason or another don't want international layouts on their computers.

[pastilla.livejournal.com]

Very cool add-on.

As for LJ, I like 7.6 (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4536).

[polyarnik.livejournal.com]

Thanks, trying to figure it out. Seems like too much is going on there, not sure I can minimize it for my needs.

[pashator.livejournal.com]

I do see your point with Mac and design programs (however I believe even on Mac it is possible to change combination to switch languages/layouts) so I just want to point it out that phonetic keyboard/layout is really wrong and discourage anybody from using it. It'll take really a couple of days to learn normal russian layout if one can type already in English or other languages. It'll take a bit longer to learn it from scratch but it is really worth it.

Again, I'm not trying to argue, I'm simply pointing it out!

[polyarnik.livejournal.com]

In any case: with this add-on you can choose a proper layout too. There's a bunch of options for every taste.

[ephraim-oakes.livejournal.com]

i'm just curious why you think the phonetic keyboard is problematic. i mean, other than eventually acquiring an old cyrillic typewriter (which i would love to do someday), i can't really see why it's worth it to learn the russian layout. but i'm open to hearing other opinions.

[cassandraclue.livejournal.com]

1) If you ever want to go to Russia, the keyboards you encounter there won't be phonetic.

2) The letters are grouped in a much more logical way for typing Russian.

3) There is still memorization involved, as Russian has many letters that English does not.

4) This is just my personal theory, but I believe that native speakers of English need to remove themselves from English and "English logic" (i.e., how something is said in English) as much as possible and concentrate on producing idiomatic Russian without calques from English while they're learning Russian. If you have to type using English phonetic equivalents, it links English and Russian too closely while you're typing.

5) It's just not hard. Put some stickers on your keys. If you type enough in Russian, like if you write a term paper or something, you'll quickly become efficient using the Russian layout. In the long run, you'll type faster using the regular russian keyboard than the phonetic one because the letter placement makes more sense.