Russian Keyboards

[Beyer, Tom]

I have been reluctant to enter the discussion since I have seen so many
changes in the past twenty five years. When in 1986 I helped convince
Middlebury to purchase Apple Macintosh computers because of their foreign
language capabilities (and long before any other computers outside of the
government could support Cyrillic), we developed the Middleburyski QWERTY
font and keyboard. My students and I used it through multiple OS
generations. But today the options for layout on keyboards, touchpads,
I-phones, Droids, and a growing use of audio input, etc., make me remember
that all of us, including our students, will need to continuously adapt to
ever newer technologies. As we try to facilitate learning, I recommend we
give them choices, not dictates.

На вкус и цвет товарищей нет!

Tom Beyer
Middlebury College


On 3/1/11 11:02 AM, "Richard Robin" <rrobin at GWU.EDU> wrote:

> I used to assume a position of keyboard neutrality for teaching Russian. But
> my own students convinced me that I should make stronger pleas for (short of
> requiring) use of gosstandart (ЙЦУКЕН). The main argument went like this:
> most of them plan to be in Russia sooner or later. Most will end up typing
> on other people's computers. As for knowing where the keys are, that's a
> matter of either buying keycaps or typing out the alphabet(s) onto envelope
> labels, cutting them up and pasting onto the keys.
> 
> -Rich Robin
> 
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 8:30 AM, ejp10 <ejp10 at psu.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 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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