Russian keyboards

[Max Pyziur]

> This has been very interesting. I didn't know that phonetic keyboards 
> were so widely used. I assumed that the standard Russian keyboard would 
> be easier to use because the most frequently-used letters are more
> central, as with the QWERTY keyboard.

To add some to the discussion, the choice of keyboard layout seems to 
challenge notions of fluency. WHile I agree with Don Livingston's comment 
that a phonetic/look-a-like keyboard greatly facilitates productivity, 
like writing, keyboard layout seems to me to have something to do with the 
level of target language fluency.

Being a heritage speaker of Ukrainian, in the early 1990s I opted for 
remapping my own keyboards for something like a phonetic keyboard (this 
was still the days of 8 bit fonts and cyrillic encoding conflicts - 1251 
vs KOI8, pre hyper acceptance of UTF-8).

Sure, my keyboard had
A - А
B - Б
H - Г
and
W - Ш

Being a touch typist at between 50-70 wpm (when the winds at my back), 
phonetic/lookalike was the way to go.

However, once in a while there is an ИЦУКЕН keyboard, what then? My desire 
has always been to develop touch-typing abilities on that layout. But 
where are there tutors or exercises? Well, after twenty years of waiting, 
I think that the moment has arrived.

Similar to Don's references for resources, I'll give you mine. I'm a Linux 
user (Fedora to be specific). That's alien for most everyone. 
Nevertheless, the resources are considerable. No longer do I have to 
create my own keyboard mappings as in earlier days of Linux distributions. 
Today, I use the XFCE Desktop environment (there are at least four in the 
Linux world, to Windows one; but this isn't a religious preference, more a 
decorative one).

XFCE (and the more popular ones of KDE and Gnome) offer preset multiple 
keyboard mappings for use with different languages: for Ukrainian there 
are seven (the legacy Soviet one along with six other 
semi-phonetic/lookalike ones). For Russian, there are 13 (including 
Bashkirian). Given this menu 
of choices, my Cyrillic keyboard-mapping days are over.

As for multi-lingual typing tutors, the Linux and FOSS (Free and Open 
Source Software) community offers Klavaro; it looks like the best of 
several for this purpose.


>
> Sarah Hurst
>


fyi,

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com

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