Russian Keyboards

[Vanchu, Anthony J. (JSC-AH)[BARRIOS TECHNOLOGY]]

Actually, to use the native Russian keyboard, students would have to make an investment, but it need be neither the amount of time necessary to memorize the keyboard layout (which is what I did, by necessity in the late 70s) nor to purchase a special keyboard.  There are transparent keyboard stickers which allow the Latin letters to remain visible and the Russian letters to show in the remaining space on each key.  These can be purchased for as little as $1.00 each if you find the right on-line source.

A propos the homophonic vs. native Russian keyboard, we require our students to learn the native Russian keyboard because this is what they will encounter on the Russian laptops on the International Space Station.  Introducing the software needed to allow a homophonic keyboard is not an option for a number of reasons

Tony Vanchu

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From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of ejp10 [ejp10 at PSU.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 7:30 AM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Russian Keyboards

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

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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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