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Showing posts with label keyboards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label keyboards. Show all posts

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Buying Laptops & Phones Overseas - To Gain Or Avoid Different Keyboards, Accents, Dollar & Money Signs

 If you want a Webster's Dictionary or a keyboard with dollar signs, the USA is a good place to buy them.


Dollar sign on Keyboards.

If you want A Japanese, Russian, Greek or Hebrew keyboard, those countries would have the biggest choice of keyboards already in their language.

You can swich your keybaord in settings, but how do you remember which key to press? You need to buy an overlay of the right keyboard. Or print one out, as a temporary measure. 

On my Samsung phone, I simply click on the key showing the globe, and up pops the Hebrew language I set when I was trying to learn Hebrew on Duolingo.

The Globe Symbol

Once, long after I had given up trying to learn Hebrew, I must have accidentally tapped on the globe key. Everything went into Hebrew and I had no idea why. I was in shock, in panic, in despair. Fortunately, my husband knew what the problem was. He just tapped on the globe symbol and magically my keyboard was back to normal.

Dollar and Pound Signs On Keyboards

$$$$$$$

 When buying a laptop overseas, or at home, note whether the keyboard has dollar signs or pound signs on the keyboard. America uses dollars. On my Dell keyboard, the dollar sign is above the number 4.

So does Singapore. In Singapore you add the capital leter S before the dollar sign, S$. 

To Change Keyboard Signs

If you are technically minded, you can go into settings and re-configure any key on your keyboard. We did this once when the key for full stop was stuck. We switched it with the colon which was rarely used. For several days I instinctively used the full stop key with no result. So we found that you need to print and stick on the new sign on the key.

Then one day we cleaned the keyboard with a blower. The Key must have been jammed by a microscopic piece of grit, or toast. We removed the sticker, then reconfigured the keyboard settings back to the way they were originally.

To Show Pound Signs On Laptop Keyboards

I have a Dell laptop which has dollar signs. To show pounds I can list them as GBP, as is done by some websites. I sometimes do that here in blogspot. You read my posts in blogspot where they are read-only and cannot be altered. I create posts in blogger with a passcode.

EDITING ON A PHONE

However, I can also use my Samsung phone which was bought in the UK. This has pound signs. So I can create posts on my phone with the pound signs. Alternatively, create posts on my laptop, then edit on my phone to insert the pound signs.

Keyboard Characters' Numbers 

If you have a separate numeric keyboard, you can type in the codes for certain characters which you use frequently. My husband has a list of those he uses a lot. But he knows off by heart the numbers he uses frequently. For example 0163 is the pound sign. For French and some other languages, the acute accent used frquently on the letter e is 0233.

The answers to most keyboard changes are found in your laptop manual online, or Youtube, or Quora, or Wikihow. AI nowadays often quotes wiki.

Another way to find out is to pop into a laptop or phone shop. Even if they don't sell your brand of laptop or phone, if they are not busy, some helpful extravert sales person will probably be happy to show you.

If you are stuck, and in a shopping mall, make for a McDonalds or Costa where a group of schoolchildren are doing homework on their laptops. You might not want to release your phone to somebody walking in the street, but a group stuck like sardines might be a safer bet.

Pleasse share links to your favourite blog posts.

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.


Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Typing Romanian Characters



Problem
How do you type Romanian accents? I want to learn the accents so I can speak without an accent. The way to do that is to learn Romanian from Duolingo and click on the sound symbol. I remember to do that, more often than I remember to click on the sound symbol in Google translate or Wikipedia.

Answers
I typed into Google How do I find Romanian keyboards and found this site
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201794

Google and Keyboards
The page on the laptop screen showed the Romanian keyboard, and many other languages in faint grey and could not be copied in cut and past, although I could have photographed it with an iPhone, mine, or somebody else's if I and a friend got together, in a kitchen or study at home, or an office or public meeting, and one had a laptop and another had a mobile phone.

I could also print it off to show a waiter or waitress in a restaurant or a receptionist or somebody sitting next to me on the plane to Romania.

Accents in Wikipedia
Next step is to look for Romanian accents in Wikipedia. I should have done a post on this at the start. I shall look back and copy some of the contents.

www.romaniatourism.com

Author
Angela Lansbury, English teacher and learner of languages.