purplepixie Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5017 days ago 26 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Greek
| Message 1 of 25 23 February 2011 at 10:17am | IP Logged |
This is a very newbie question - not new to learning languages, just to writing about it on the internet!
How do you type accents, tilde, umlaut, non-roman letters etc online? I am using a samsung netbook and have no idea how to do this, so my written Spanish online always lacks accents etc. And I'd have no idea where to start with a language using a different alphabet like Greek or Thai.
Could someone explain to me, treat me like an idiot? (I'm not the most techno-savvy person around!)
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Psychedelica Diglot Newbie NetherlandsRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5304 days ago 7 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, French, Swedish
| Message 2 of 25 23 February 2011 at 10:53am | IP Logged |
You could change your keyboard layout to one that has dead keys, so that when you press ' and after that e, for example, you see é, when you press " + u you get ü, etc. You can also use AltGr as a dead key, which I prefer, but the most common is ' (and ", and ~...). I assume you use Windows, so this should work.
Another way is to use Alt codes.
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JimC Senior Member United Kingdom tinyurl.com/aberdeen Joined 5539 days ago 199 posts - 317 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 3 of 25 23 February 2011 at 11:10am | IP Logged |
This is the best method I have come across (and I have tried a few). This little tool sits on top of any window and can be used in any program or browser window.
Unlike other such tools, you don't have to be online to use it.
Spanish Letters
Jim
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stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5824 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin
| Message 4 of 25 23 February 2011 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
Similar to the one suggested above and available in a multitude of languages
lexibar
Useful when typing online when not on your own computer:
lexilogos
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zekecoma Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5336 days ago 561 posts - 655 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish
| Message 5 of 25 23 February 2011 at 12:25pm | IP Logged |
I use the US International keyboard layout. Won't work for a lot of languages. But for
German, Spanish, French, Dutch it work perfectly fine. I just have to do
Alt + q = ä
Alt + s = ß
Alt + y = ü
Alt + p = ö
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Lucas Pentaglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5159 days ago 85 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English, German, Italian, Russian Studies: Mandarin
| Message 6 of 25 23 February 2011 at 12:29pm | IP Logged |
- German: I have a swiss keyboard, so there's no problem with the umlaut.
- Portuguese: I don't know how to write the tilde, so I don't write it...same for the
mäcen in slovak (for example there should be a mäcen on the c and the n of "mäcen").
- Russian: russian letters doesn't correspond with latin ones of the keyboards, so I
write in latin transcription.
- Chinese: you type the syllab in phonetics and the system proposes you a list of
characters from wich you choose the one you need.
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 7 of 25 23 February 2011 at 1:36pm | IP Logged |
When I write in Greek or Russian or Esperanto or Icelandic I mostly use a homepage called Lexilogos, which has something like a virtual keyboard (there are some other homepages with the same thing). But on my ordinary Danish keyboard I luckily have most of the combinations with ordinary accents (including things like ñ,ü and ê), and then I have memorized a number of combinations with the ALT key plus a number: ß = ALT +225, ç = ALT + 135, etc.
Edited by Iversen on 23 February 2011 at 1:37pm
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Tropi Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 5423 days ago 67 posts - 87 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin
| Message 8 of 25 23 February 2011 at 2:31pm | IP Logged |
Which languages do you want to write? For the Indo-European languages changing the keyboard layout should be sufficient. You can do that with:
- Windows: I think it's control panel -> regional settings
- Mac: System Settings -> Regional Settings
- Linux: depends on which GUI you use, GNOME and KDE have a setting manager for sure. But you can use the cli tool "xkbsettings" else.
And for more "exotic" languages like Korean, Japanese, Chinese etc. you have to look it up. For example I use the ITABC input method for Chinese which allows me to type syllables in pinyin and then puts the correct character for me. (Or let's me choose if more than one fit.)
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