Nasel'niki i svyazochki

[Rachel Platonov]

My experience of dual-alphabet keyboards (with both Latin and Cyrillic
characters on the keys) is that they are actually distracting! I suppose I
had gotten more accustomed that I thought to mentally converting from the
Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic "on the fly," and had learned to put up with
the fact that, more often than not, I mis-type and then have to re-type
Cyrillic characters that correlate less neatly to Latin ones (soft sign,
hard sign, ju, zh, etc.). (I type in Russian using a transliterated keyboard
layout.)

What is particularly interesting about this experience is that my husband--a
native speaker of Russian--had the exact same reaction to the dual-language
keyboard, and complained that it slowed him down quite a lot when he was
typing in either English or Russian. He greatly prefers the Latin-only
keyboard, and even uses a transliterated keyboard layout, as I do.

We both had a considerable amount of time to adjust to the new device (about
2 months), but in the end, I still found the added presence of the Cyrillic
alphabet on the keys merely "not so annoying anymore," never really useful.

Obviously, though, this is very much a matter of personal preference. Such
keyboards are not terribly expensive in Russia (one can be purchased for
about $20, I think), so if one has the opportunity as well as the desire to
try one out, it's not a terribly big investment.

- Rachel Platonov

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