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Friday, July 7, 2017

Installing keyboards in Cyrillic and other alphabets


Bulgaria


Problem
How do you add the accents and letters for other alphabets when giving foreign place names or making lists of words when learning a language?

Answers
I have added to my laptop the keyboards for:
British
Russian
Russian - phonetic
Spanish
ABC - AZERTY
Greek
Italian
Hebrew
Romanian
Polish
Welsh
Pinyin simplified (Chinese)Belgian
Ukrainian

In Word you can have more than one open at once which is really useful if you want to type a column of words in a foreign language and the translations.

Unfortunately on an Apple MacBook Pro I can only find one keyboard at a time. The symbol for the keyboard you are using is the national flag symbol at the top of your screen on the right on my machine.

If you want to install a new keyboard, hunt for one on the internet and follow the instructions.

Tips On Typing Accents
For adding accents, hold down the letter on your keyboard. For example, the letters a  and e, if you hold them down up pops a choice of accents. Depending on how your system works, you either continue holding the vowel key down and tap on the number which appears under or over the accent you want.

In French I find that the most commonly used accents require me to tap on the keys 1 or 2. If you remember which is which accent, you will go faster. If not, tap on one. If that brings up the wrong accent, simple tap on two.

Ukrainian
When I found a Ukrainian keyboard, it required me to locate 'keyboards' on the laptop. When I typed that into the search box I found all the articles I had written which used the word Keyboards.

So I opened a new tab and typed in: how do I find keyboards on a Mac?

I found that by clicking on 'preferences' I found the keyboards symbol.

Cyrillic
The Cyrillic alphabet is the one used by Russian. Is that the same as Bulgarian and Ukrainian. Almost but not quite.

British and American
Think about the alphabet used for English. The letters are the same. But American and British spellings are different. So are some pronunciations.

England and French
The French use the same alphabet but add a few letters with accents. Once you know the alphabet for English it is easier to pick up the alphabet for French (if your first language is Chinese or Russian).

Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian
Similarly, you have a head start if you have learned Russian first when adding on a new language such as Bulgarian or Ukrainian.

FLIGHTS

To fly to these countries check the national and budget airlines:
http://www.aeroflot.com/ru-en (Russian)
www.bulgaria-air.co.uk/
ryanair.com
https://www.cheapflights.co.uk/find-flights/to-Ukraine

Tips
More details from
https://www.duolingo.com/comment/17638789 Ukrainian letters and links to pages on verbs. Personal pronouns grammar portal.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-and-linguistics/slavic

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have many posts on languages. Please share links to your favourite posts.


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