Russian Keyboards

[ejp10]

I also have to agree with those that using a QWERTY version of Cyrillic makes the most sense for students in the U.S., partly because students here will usually  ONLY see the Latin characters when they're typing. That is, even when a Russian keyboard utility is activated, the output changes, but the physical keys will remain as U.S. Latin. 

They wouldn't be able to see where the Cyrillic characters are unless they invest in a special plugin keyboard (like the ones used in Russia)
http://www.russiankeyboardstore.com/index.html

Asking a student to memorize positions of hidden characters seems more complicated than necessary. It doesn't sound like that's what happens in Russian when students learn Latin QWERTY.

On the other hand, if a student is going abroad to Russia, it would be worth introducing them to the Russian layout. However, I am assuming that once a student is in Russian and in an Internet cafe or computer lab, the position of the Cyrillic characters would be visible. I would also assume that the student would be fairly comfortable reading and writing Cyrillic by this point.

Elizabeth

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D.
Instructional Designer/Lecturer in Linguistics
Penn State University
ejp10 at psu.edu
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/

Got Unicode Blog
http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/gotunicode/index.html

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