Russian handwriting in US classrooms in the computer age

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Melissa Smith wrote:

> To add some personal anecdotes to the discussion:
>
> As an American who learned to touch-type in her teens, I can still
> recite the repetitive training mantra "A S D F space, J K L semicolon L
> K J"), and thus find the phonetic keyboard pretty much imperative in my
> dotage. I have done MUCH typing on Russian keyboards, but my most
> searing experience was as a foreign-language department secretary in
> the 1970s, when I used an electric typewriter with an IBM Selectric
> ball, on which the cyrillic characters purported to be the
> "gosstandart" (to use my colleague's phrase), but uniformly shifted one
> key to the right. Typing mimeographs and ditto-masters while shifting
> between English and Russian was hell. I now joke with students that I
> got my Ph.D "because "I didn't type so good," and that I NEVER would
> have completed my dissertation had not the personal computer become a
> fact of life in the early 1980s, when I revised draft after draft to
> incorporate the changes suggested by my readers.
>
> While there is merit in developing flexibility in fine-motor
> coordination, I would suggest that is hardly the top priority in one's
> linguistic-professiional development!

Everyone has different preferences and learning styles. I find it 
difficult to type Russian with a phonetic keyboard because I get 
interference from English. Using the Russian keyboard helps me keep the 
two languages separate, and I got pretty quick at it once the first year 
had passed.

I can't say what your students' reactions would be, but some of them may 
be similar to mine.

I stopped a year short of my Ph.D. -- perhaps because I'm a good typist...

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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